This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ ‘More Bang for the Buck’: Examining the Determinants of Terrorist Adoption of New Weapons Technologies Ackerman, Gary Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). 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E-Thesis Coversheet Author: Gary Anthony Ackerman Title: ‘More Bang for the Buck’: Examining the Determinants of Terrorist Adoption of New Weapons Technologies Copyright of this thesis rests with the author Use of this document is governed by Creative Commons end user licence agreement: CC-BY- NC-ND, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ ‘More Bang for the Buck’ Examining the Determinants of Terrorist Adoption of New Weapons Technologies Gary Anthony Ackerman Thesis Submitted in Support of a PhD Degree in War Studies 1 Abstract As modern technologies appear and mature, those concerned with security often fear that these technologies will expand the destructiveness of asymmetric adversaries, terrorists chief among them. Yet, historically, only a small subset of terrorists has been particularly innovative with respect to weapons selection and use. This interdisciplinary study seeks to fill a gap in current research on the topic of terrorist behaviour by examining the dynamics underlying terrorist weapons adoption, with the aim of elucidating the technological and organizational mechanisms behind changes in the instruments of terror. The study explores the topic from two different theoretical perspectives: the historical adoption of weapons by a variety of actors and terrorist (and more general) organizational innovation. The result is the identification of a complex web of factors that is distilled down to a framework representing a highly contingent interaction between the terrorist organization and the prospective weapon in a particular social, political, and security setting. In order to supplement and provide a preliminary validation of the initial model, the adoption behaviour of four different terrorist organizations is analysed, using pairwise comparison and other techniques. The cases largely confirm the central theoretical strategic and tactical logic of weapons adoption, as well as highlight the crucial role played by a variety of contingent factors, from ideology to the terrorists’ social networks. In so doing, the study challenges notions of technological determinism with respect to terrorists and emerging technologies by identifying several key factors that can confound or facilitate a terrorist group’s successful adoption of a new weapon. The insights gained through this study can assist policymakers and practitioners by identifying the technology-organization dyads of greatest concern and introducing a new methodology for discerning between those terrorists that are likely to embrace new technologies of lethality and those that will stumble along the way. 2 Table of Contents Page Chapter 1: Introduction 5 Chapter 2: The Diffusion of Weapons – A Theoretical and Historical 31 Analysis Chapter 3: Terrorists and Innovation 65 Chapter 4: Development of a Terrorist Weapons Adoption Model 102 Chapter 5: Case Study Methodology 111 Chapter 6: Irish Nationalists and the Adoption of Mortar Technology 120 Chapter 7: The American Far Right and the Adoption of Cyanide and 162 Rockets Chapter 8: Cross-Case Comparison and Model Analysis 211 Chapter 9: Conclusion 237 Appendix A: The Diffusion of Weapons – A History 251 Appendix B: Case Study Tables 312 Appendix C: Illustrative Application of the Weapons Adoption Model 343 Bibliography 354 3 Tables and Figures Page Figure 4.1: Representation of Influences on the Terrorist Adoption of New 103 Weapons Table 4.1: The Terrorist Weapon Adoption Model 106 Table 6.1: PIRA Mortar Development 158 Table 7.1: CSA Weapons Innovations 165 Table 7.2: Summary of Major Criminal Activity by The Order 191 Table 8.1: Awareness of New Weapons 213 Table 8.2: The Adoption Decision 215 Table 8.3: Adoption Success 216 Table 8.4: Model Results Summary 220 Table 8.5: Suggested Modifications to the Terrorist Weapons Adoption 234 Model Table 9.1: Summary Results of Illustrative Model Application 244 Table B.1: PIRA-INLA Weapon Awareness Sub-Model 311 Table B.2: PIRA-INLA Adoption Decision Sub-Model 313 Table B.3: PIRA-INLA Adoption Success Sub-Model 316 Table B.4: CSA-Order Weapon Awareness Sub-Model 319 Table B.5: CSA-Order Adoption Decision Sub-Model 321 Table B.6: CSA-Order Adoption Success Sub-Model 325 Table C.1: Model Factors and Values 341 Table C.2: Awareness Scores 344 Table C.3: Decision Scores 346 Table C.4: Success Scores 349 4 Chapter 1: Introduction Man has, it can be said, often excelled at engaging in violent conflict with his fellow man. Over time, his chosen tools for this purpose – weapons – have become increasingly efficient. This dynamic can be illustrated by observing that for several millennia the harm that could be reliably inflicted during a single act of violence by an independent individual or small group was more or less limited to felling one opponent with a blow from a melee weapon, or the launch of a spear or arrow.1 The invention of gunpowder, followed several hundreds of years later by dynamite, expanded the scale of casualties to the hundreds, whereas the perfidious ploy of turning the enemy’s own infrastructures into weapons against him, as on 11 September 2001, elevated the level of destruction into the low thousands. Yet at no previous point in human history has a relatively small and isolated group of adversaries possessed the ability to, on their own, acquire and use a weapon capable of unleashing a single attack that could devastate economies, disrupt the social functions of large areas, or kill and injure hundreds of thousands of human beings. Modern technologies, however – ranging from synthetic biology to so-called ‘3D printing’ – may very well provide opportunities for creating such asymmetric levels of damage. And when it comes to actors capitalizing on these opportunities, terrorists, who are counted among the foremost practitioners of asymmetric conflict in our time, naturally feature high on the list of concerns. Indeed, if such an unholy union took place between certain sets of technologies and non-state malefactors, it would in some sense ‘represent the apogee of the firepower arc and the true “consumerization” ’ of mass destruction, in which ‘small groups of violent dissenters from the status quo, driven by solipsistic and uncompromising ideologies, become capable of repeatedly unleashing the most devastating weapons known to humanity and are thus able to present themselves as credible rivals to the state’s current monopoly on military power’.2 One 1 Arson, poisoning and contamination were not unheard of in antediluvian warfare, but their effects were either circumscribed to a single food or water source or ultimately depended on a fair amount of luck (the presence of dry wood or the assistance of pathogenic microorganisms), making the scale of the harm caused unreliable. Siege engines (such as the ballista, catapult and trebuchet) could inflict more damage, but their acquisition was almost certainly beyond the reach of independent actors, i.e., those unsupported by a larger political entity. 2 Jeremy Tamsett and Gary Ackerman, ‘Conclusion’ in Gary Ackerman and Jeremy Tamsett (eds.), Jihadists and Weapons of Mass Destruction (Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, 2009), pp.