Battle Plan

Ralph Peters is an expert on the covert, the classified, and the catastrophic.

A former U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, he spent the late 1980s skulking through the Soviet Union, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and South America as a foreign area officer assigned to gather sensitive information about hostile territories. For the past decade, he's been busy tapping into terrorism chat rooms, attending international defense seminars, and imaging the unimaginable as the author of eight spine-tingling novels, including Traitor (Avon Books, 2000) and The Devil's Garden (Avon Books, 1999). In short, Ralph Peters knows his villains -- and his heroes.

He also knows that war today is a bewildering reality that pits ponderous, bureaucratic coalitions against small bands of fighters who don't recognize traditional rules of warfare -- the sort of fighters we came to know all too well on September 11. To confront these new foes, large military establishments must devise new strategies and new rules of engagement, Peters says in his 1999 nonfiction debut, Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? (Stackpole Books) -- a chilling analysis of war and peace in an age of unknown enemies and uncertain outcomes.

"In a way, Islam is the ultimate bureaucracy, so laden with arcane rules and practices that it cannot adapt to survive," says Peters, who retired from his Pentagon post in early 1998. "But on a tactical level, the Islamic terrorists have proved much more nimble because they are largely unconstrained by law, by national boundaries, and by bureaucratic rules. They certainly have organizational procedures and approval chains, but they can react more flexibly and swiftly than any government."

In a recent conversation with Fast Company, Peters outlined key tactics for understanding, fighting, and defeating the new, nimble enemy. Though many of his military principles apply beyond the battlefield, Peters is the first to point out that "at the end of the day, the military is about killing people, and business is about profits. Those are pretty different objectives." Here are Peters's nine strategies for victory in his own words.

Know Your Enemy

Understanding the culture of the target -- whether it's a hostile enemy during wartime or an audience of consumers -- is the best strategy for success. The terrorists who struck on September 11 were surprisingly ignorant about American culture. They intended to punish us, to shame us, and to triumph over us. They thought that they could terrorize us with impunity, and they thought that September 11 would intimidate us. They totally misread their target audience.

The terrorists certainly wounded us and hurt our pride, but Americans aren't cowardly. When we're aroused, we're actually pretty mean and savage. I don't think Osama bin Laden ever expected our response to include bombers over Afghanistan. He didn't expect us to retaliate with the resolve we have already shown. Now the terrorists are playing into our hands by continuing to do vicious things that make Americans angrier and more dedicated to victory. Did the terrorists do something that gained them tremendous attention but that will ruin them in the long run? I think they did.

Conversely, America must understand the terrorists' culture in order to anticipate their actions and understand why they do what they do. Inside knowledge won't help us come to any accommodation with bin Laden, but it will help us defeat him more easily.

Yet America continues to misread Islamic fundamentalists. For all the rhetoric of the past month, Americans still don't realize how incoherently and deeply we are hated. these fundamentalists do hate us. And they don't want to understand. They aren't interested in being converted. They're interested in having someone to blame. They want someone to be guilty for their failures, and America is the obvious target.

Crunch More Than Numbers

The American culture is innately self-critical. With self-criticism, you get self-knowledge and an understanding of why things work. Statistics are very important to our companies and our government, because they help us learn how to improve. But too often we satisfy our intelligence demands by memorizing facts.

You've got to reach beyond the facts to understand the mentality. And that is very, very hard. By and large, we content ourselves with learning the externals, but we rarely penetrate the internals of the enemy. If we focus only on the terrorists' behaviors, we will miss their souls.