OPEN OFFICE SPACE. So, Spencer, could we say that the War on Terror has a been a boon for low level managers at Al Qaeda? More seriously, I wonder where Al Qaeda has made its most serious human capital investments. Every kind of organization, from corporate to military, relies on an expert class that holds the knowledge, training, and connections needed to make the group function. This class is often not the elite leadership; the State Department, for example, relies much more on career professionals than on the political appointees who often occupy the top spots. Similarly, the US Army would have a difficult time doing anything without its expert, professional non-commissioned officer corps. I really haven't the faintest idea how human expertise is distributed in Al Qaeda, but it seems more likely that not that it isn't concentrated in the celebrity leadership that CIA has until recently been tracking. As the disintegration and dispersal of the core Al Qaeda group has been one effect of the War on Terror, I also wonder how much of this expertise is being employed in different groups around the world and potentially spread to new areas. Of course, terrorist training camps exist for a reason (they make it easier to create human capital), so the overall effect of breaking up the Al Qaeda concentration may be a wash or net positive.
--Robert Farley
