ABSTRACT
America’s military doctrine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was based on wars against opponents whose military forces were organized bureaucratically and acted as agents of states involved in the conflicts. Current military campaigns, by contrast, involve combatants who are non-state actors, whose organization is embedded in more traditional social structures. Doctrine for the former conflicts was informed by an understanding of bureaucratic organization. Max Weber’s (1968) ideal-typical portrayal of bureaucracy was rooted in the Prussian military. More recent campaigns, however, are more informed by Simmel’s understanding of social networks. This conceptualization contributed to Operation Red Dawn: the capture of Saddam Hussein. This chapter uses the unclassified intelligence data gathered in Iraq that, by analyzing
social networks, led to the capture of Saddam Hussein. The phrase “social network” refers to a set of actors and the ties among them. The network analyst models these relationships to depict the structure of a group (Wasserman and Faust 1994). We apply social network analysis to Saddam Hussein’s network, providing an evaluation of those concepts and methods when applied to an insurgency. We identify social network methods and measures that are useful in understanding the intricacies of an insurgent network.
