I - Concepts
· These international groups that represent today the forms of threats which endanger us in terms of individuals as in terms of the principles of our social organization are what we call today "non military, strategic level threats " . These threatening entities are more and more polymorphic, hybrid, protoplasmic, while being particularly dangerous.
- This hybridization is the result of the following components:
1. These entities usually mix political, ideological or religious action with all types of violent and criminal activities.
2. Nowadays these entities operate more according to galactic or planetary systems than to pyramidal chains of command: there is a hardcore and groups that have more or less implications gravitating around it; the doctrine doesn`t necessarily emanate from the center as part can bring its own share.
3. These entities are disseminated all over the world:
* they are very mobile,
* they have a relatively low profile, but not all of them,
* they use diasporas not to appear too clearly (as camouflage) and for logistics,
* but they also may have sanctuaries, generally "gray areas" (concept) or disrupted states (concept)
4 The "cause" of these entities can be anything: ideology, money, both, revenge, envy ... This goes from religious extremism to antiglobalization movements (a nebula to watch closely) as well as sectarian beliefs or traditional organized crime.
5 Their targets are democracy and the Western way of life
6 All these entities use very similar fighting tools. It is mostly the " low cost-high effect mean" we call terrorism.
The financing of these threatening entities is less and less state sponsored, with the exception of the World's "grey areas" and more and more "private" or autonomous: laundered criminal money, "revolutionary tax" as well as "donations" turned in black money for criminal uses.
Brought together, these elements bring about a chemical change of nature, a metamorphosis (to explain: water changes into steam). This metamorphosis causes an exponential increase in the danger because it deprives us of more traditional landmarks.
The final result is that the emergent threats that are materialized in these entities radically jeopardize our way of living and all the principles that democratic societies tried to build for years.
So, what are the problems that we can summarize concerning these fuzzy groups:
- basically, their motivations and claims are not obvious...
- As for organization, we have to think in terms of networks and moral authority and no more in terms of chain of command as in our own, traditional military.
Altogether, our work is more difficult and we have to be flexible.