Dynamics of insurgent innovation: How Hezbollah and other non-state actors develop new capabilities

Abstract

Few issues are more important to security studies scholars than understanding how violent nonstate groups innovate. To shed new light on this subject, we examine Hezbollah's innovations and the underlying processes that produced them. Based on this case, the most successful violent non-state groups are arguably those that systematically pursue incremental innovation. Although less dramatic than their discontinuous counterparts, a commitment to steadily improve an organizations' tactics and techniques can have dramatic effects. Indeed, even Hezbollah's remarkable performance during the 2006 Lebanon War is attributable to the perfection of techniques utilized since the organization's inception. While innovations were incremental in character, a bottom-up process of learning and experimentation by field commanders was critical to generating most of these innovations. If generalizable to other violent non-state actors, these findings suggest that the most formidable insurgent and terrorist groups will actually be those that relentlessly pursue incremental innovations in a bottom-up fashion.

Fragmented Emergency: Sirens, Cellphones, and Sonic Spatialization in Israel

“…With the IDF gone, firing positions also advanced significantly closer to the border, thus enabling Hizballah to shoot farther into Israel. 6 Almost concurrently, the Second Intifada that started in 2000 brought Hamas organization in the Gaza Strip to develop rocketlaunching skills too. While using mortars before, in 2001, Hamas fired its first locally produced Qasam rocket outside the boundaries of the Strip and hit the town of Sderot.…”