Modern Combat: Terrorism

In Modern combat, the battlefield isn’t just two armies colliding with each other anymore. There are now many different problems a country has to deal with. Sometimes the problem doesn’t even come from a different country. The most difficult foe a country can face is a terrorist organization. Terrorists are a problem to a country because terrorism influences the way civilians think and make decisions.

-Terrorism
Terrorism is used to make the civilians of a government change their habits, or to make people/countries do what the terrorists want. The act of terrorism is very much alike Guerrilla Warfare. Terrorist groups are made of ordinary citizens who want something to happen/change. Since they are made up of citizens, terrorist groups are very difficult to stop. A very infamous terrorist group today is Al-Qaeda.Al-Qaeda helps supply, recruit, and train thousands of soldiers from what was at first an Afghan resistance against the Soviet Union, into the terrorist group that wants to destroy “non-Islamic” governments and to get rid of all westerners and non-Muslims from Islamic countries. A problem with Al-Qaeda is that if they attack another country, and the other government doesn’t know who attacked them, a government could respond with an attack against a country that had nothing to do with the original attack. An example of this is when September 11 happened. The United States invaded Iraq, unfairly blaming them for the attacks. Terrorist attacks are very hard to stop since they are made up of citizens. The only way to tellif someone is a terrorist is to observe them and look for suspicious activity, otherwise it is nearly impossible. Think, anyone of your friends could become a terrorist without you even knowing. If a friend can’t tell something is wrong with their friends, how should a government be able to tell?

-Terrorism influence on Civilian decisions and thoughts Civilians take a terrorist attack in many ways. One of them is uniting the people of a country, which happened from 9/11 in the U.S. Uniting a country that is attacked by terrorists is never the goal of terrorists. What terrorists want to do to the civilians is to make them scared, or terrorize them. One way that a terrorist’s goal is achieved is by killing a lot of civilians. By killing civilians, terrorists try to force a country to submit to the demands of the terrorist’s organization. A good example of this is when Israel left a country that it had invaded because they had too many young people killed. The civilians were also tired of having rockets blow-up on their own cities. When civilians are not happy, they might demonstrate their unhappiness until they get what they want, which in this case would be complying with the terrorists’ demands.
When a terrorist attack happens, it frightens the citizens of a country. Citizens will then lose the belief that their government can protect them. When this happens, some of the people could start a petition for a new leadership and some others might try to cause anarchy. When the people of a country lose confidence in their government, some could start a riot, which would only help the terrorists’ goals by weakening the country even more.

Terrorism is a major problem around the world. It is quite possibly the most problematic thing that could happen to a country. Terrorists are much harder to defeat than traditional soldiers because terrorists are made up of civilians. Since they are made up of civilians, a country could have a lot of problems identifying who caused the attack. Today, I think terrorism is much harder on a country than having to fight another country because most countries don’t want to invade another country by mistaking them for the attack.

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