ABSTRACT
A watershed event in 1983 changed all of that. The terrorist bombing of the US Marine Corps Barracks in Beirut can be seen as the opening gambit in a new era of warfare, when ideological and/or religious enemies of global hegemonic powers first grasped that they could achieve their ‘security’ objectives quite handily using non-traditional weapons systems and tactics, without the need to engage in force-on-force tactics which would lessen their advantage. With a seemingly synchronized march forward of attacks around the world at a set periodicity of one attack at almost every 2.5 years, the Al Qaeda network – the most obvious and apparently dedicated terrorist organization in the world – successfully executed the worst attack on U.S. soil in the Nation’s history with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC. At the dawn of the new millennium, the events of 9/11 and the subsequent bombings in Madrid and London have demonstrated that the ‘battlefield’ is no longer a distant place and that these strategic-impact acts of terrorism have ushered us into the ‘Era of Asymmetrical Threats’.
