The Use of Predictive Profiling as “Counter Asymmetrical Warfare” 

When people hear the term “asymmetrical warfare,” they are apt to imagine the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) or some other aspect of guerilla warfare tactics.  The poor David uses his homemade slingshot, and kills the rich Goliath, who is adorned with impressive, expensive—and useless—military hardware.  So then  the think tank and study groups scramble to identify how to thwart the emerging threat of asymmetric warfare that appears in the world today.  Yet we are missing something.  Somehow we have missed the most obvious point—that asymmetrical strategy has always been with us.  In fact, there is an actual, finite number of “tricks” that people employ, whether with weapons of warfare or within the bloodless confines of white collar places of business. 

Earlier this year, Kaihan Krippendorff turned our concept of asymmetrical warfare upside down by challenging our assumptions on restricting asymmetric strategy to the concept to warfare.  He authored “Hide a Dagger Behind a Smile: Use the 36 Ancient Chinese Strategies to Seize the Competitive Edge ” (Avon: Adams Media, 2008).  Krippendorff posits that this ancient corpus of “The 36 Strategies”—which coexists on the same plane and with the same credibility as Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” and Lao Tzu’s “Tao Te Ching”—outlines the definitive and finite asymmetrical strategies that people (whether as terrorists, armies or  corporations) exploit and therefore defeat their opponents.  The author made a detailed study of over 9,000 of the most successful corporations around the world, focusing on how the top 100 had utilized one or more of the 36 asymmetrical stratagems (the same ones used in warfare!) to gain competitive edge.  Asymmetric strategy was not unique to “war” (projection of national power for political ends); but also existed in more sophisticated forms where people exploited one another every day at corporate levels.  

For example, take the 33rd stratagem, which is “Hide a Dagger Behind a Smile”.  According to Krippendorff, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin partnered in 2000 with Yahoo! for search engine support, when Google – at the time – was the 48th most popular search engine in the world.  (Their “smile” was that Google did not use advertising on its portal but only on its search results; Yahoo! was mislead into believing that Google had misplaced focus, and therefore was no threat to Yahoo!‘s market dominance.)  Within three years, Yahoo! terminated its relationship with Google, but the move was too late, as Google had become the world’s premier search engine, and remains so with over 50% of world market share.  The Google illustration is one simple example.  Krippendorff’s intent is that the reader identify and counter such strategies in order to develop and defend their own business growth activities.  How can we apply this to counterterrorism? How can we use the 36 stratagems to oppose asymmetrical warfare?  Are the methods of studying and countering asymmetrical strategies only useful within the business world?  Our answer is no. 

One principle with direct application is Stratagem 10: “Remove the Firewood from Under the Pot,” and this is where the Chameleon methodology of Predictive Profiling is effective at undermining the terrorist, our opponent in the asymmetrical warfare equation.  The idea behind this stratagem is to attack the source of power of your opponent without his awareness of your intentions.  (In Krippendorff’s interpretation of the Chinese texts, “When confronted with a powerful enemy, do not fight them head on but try to find their weakest spot to initiate collapse.”)  “Predicative Profiling” does exactly this— the tradecraft is a structured process of identifying how terrorists approach a protected environment, and undermining the terrorist’s use of cover stories and intentions in trying to penetrate that protected environment.  To put it another way, if we can “remove the firewood from under the pot” through Predictive Profiling, then we effectively mitigate the asymmetric threat posed by the terrorist in the protected environment.  While David’s sling may seem a humble tool, likewise Chameleon’s methodology of Predictive Profiling is in the end a valuable, cost-effective way to place the terrorist on the defensive, and so turn the terrorist into the slain Goliath of asymmetric warfare.

Chameleon Associates

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