Very true, Tank Hunter; the military and/or intelligence types would, in many respects, be the most vulnerable with so many arrows pointing in their direction. Cell structures can help to reduce this, but not eliminate it, especially when such individuals are the cadres themselves, and thus have to have contact with multiple individuals, not just one or a few. It seems that OSW groups would most likely require the implicit or inadvertent complicity of the media, or at least sufficient freedom of access to telecommunications in order to both try to get their message out, and to gather information on what's going on, and who's done what. The media might be dealt with more or less effectively by a determined government (or perhap by a corporation or corporations - or other non-state actors), through misinformation or censorship. But disrupting telecommunications between individuals and even groups, from phone/cell calls and text messaging, the internet, hand-helds, and the like, could be pretty tough, potentially. AQ operatives have frequently used cell phones and their associated accounts for just a single call before discarding them in order to minimize their chances of detection. Even attemtps at rigid control of telecommunications means by government security services could by no means be expected to achieve completely consistent results. Even in places like China, dissidents still manage to get their messages through, even if just temporarily. This raises another issue, however, about a possible strategy, or character of OSW. What if, in a tightly-controlled public sphere, an OSW group or movement of otherwise independent groups simply by-passed the general media (assuming it might even be tighly controlled by the government and thus more or less denied to the OSW groups as a medium for their own message), and resorted to modern personal telecommunications as a means by which to coordinate individuals within an OSW group, or even different OSW groups, in a campaign in the shadows against, say, a government? What I am suggesting is that the OSW groups, practically denied access to the public media, simply forego trying to move the public one way or the other, and just go for the jugular - the organs of the state (or non-state actor) and the officials who run them - straight away? A war waged wholly in the shadows, by shadows. An exceedingly high-risk approach - a gamble really - , but for the fanatically determined, an approach with potentially very high payoffs, if enough damage can be done whilst evading detection or destruction by the security forces. So a question to be asked is, is it possible for an OSW group, or a series of roughly similar groups bound by a common motive or objective, to inflict enough damage on a State (or for that matter, a non-State actor) to either bring it down or at least to coerce it into making certain concessions? That said, OSW groups would likely have a typical life-span of a few days to weeks once they began engaging in openly violent, active OSW operations against a State; a few more competent, or fortunate groups might persist for months or even years. Against a non-State actor, such as a corporation, an OSW campaign might last for months or years, even if the OSW groups were brought down.
