Hezbollah, now attempting to fend off Israel’s September 30 ground operation, is simultaneously working to adapt its own approach to technology, and, if history is any indicator of the future, the terror group will likely continue as it has, answering Israel’s high-tech efforts with ironically harder to trace low-tech options. That Hezbollah was even using pagers was to avoid cellular detection. And as they adapt, their communications will likely go even more analog, perhaps communicating only through couriers, as Osama Bin Laden was known to do, or using physical handwritten notes and dead drops, as militant Italian anarchist groups did in the early 2000s.

While the idea of a terrorist group obtaining a more technologically advanced arsenal, such as nuclear or chemical weapons, or instituting a mass cyberattack is daunting, it is not exactly uncommon due to expense and required expertise. What is far more likely is that Hezbollah and other terrorist groups will downgrade methods, opting for cheaper and easier to implement weapons and methods which are more than capable of lethal outcomes.

Time and time again, society has seen heavy damage wrought on person and property via methods that seem relatively primitive.

In 2021, the Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas increased their use of incendiary balloons when attacking Israel, causing more than 20 fires in southern Israel, straining civilian and IDF emergency service resources, and burning upward of 10,000 acres of farmland over the preceding three years. These “balloons are easily constructed and require little setup to launch compared to rockets, which are expensive and time-consuming to produce” but are still incredibly effective.

In 2013, a US power plant in California was victim of an as yet unsolved shooting attack, damaging multiple transformers. Surprisingly set up with little to no security, the plant’s perimeter was breached and approximately 100 rounds of high-powered rifle ammunition were fired into 17 transformers before police arrived. The damage was severe enough that to avoid blackouts across Silicon Valley power had to be diverted from other areas during the months-long repair.

While these incidents are high profile, given the critical infrastructure connections, they did not result in any fatalities. However, that is not always the goal of terrorists and is hardly the reality for other common low-tech methods. Shootings, bombings, and melee attacks continue to make up the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks. Research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows that from 2015 to 2020,  85 percent of terror attacks employed one of these methods, with 12 percent being unrealized threats, 2 percent other, and 1 percent vehicle ramming.

The numbers are remarkably similar for lethal attacks in 2023 according to the 2024 Global Terrorism Index published by Vision of Humanity. Out of the 50 most lethal terrorist attacks, only one, an incident in the Homs Province of Syria, featuring an explosive-laden unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) targeting a military graduation ceremony which killed 89 people, could be thought of as a high-tech weapon. The other 49 were made up of 43 armed assaults, five bombings, and one explosive projectile.

As terrorist groups get backed into a corner by high-tech counter methods like the Israeli pager attack, it is increasingly likely they will rely on time-proven simple methods. The world may even see them adapting and learning from accidents such as the September 2024 car crash into a gas pipeline in Texas which caused an explosion or the 2017 Hamburg, Germany, airport evacuation which resulted from the accidental discharge of a simple, lipstick-sized can of pepper spray. While these were both accidents, one can imagine the economic and fear-induced impact if a terrorist group were to try to replicate the outcomes.

There are, of course, outliers to the terrorist use of low-tech methods. There is the terrorist cult Aum Shinrikyo’s launch of the notorious Tokyo Sarin gas attack in 1995 or drone attacks along the lines of  2023’s drone attack in Syria, as well as other groups’ potential use of commercial drones. But today’s would-be terrorist is likely not resorting to high-tech weapon or communication devices, and more often than not, going for something easy and/or available. To borrow from Chistopher Nolan’s Joker in the Dark Knight, items like “dynamite, and gunpowder, and gasoline [are] cheap” and are going to comprise the bulk of the future threats from terrorist groups.

Justin Leopold-Cohen is a homeland security analyst in Washington, DC. He has written widely on national and international security issues for outlets including Small Wars Journal, the Wavell Room, and Inkstick Media. Any views expressed in the article are his own and not representative of, or endorsed by, any organization or government.

Counter Terror’s High-tech to Low-tech Backfire was originally published on Global Security Review.

The Problem

In a population of 336 million, the potential death of 270 million Americans is 80 percent of the citizenry. Yet, fentanyl remains undesignated as a weapon of mass destruction (WMD). A 1961 analysis suggested that a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States, consisting of 553 nuclear weapons with a total yield of over 2,000 megatons, would kill 50-60 million Americans out of a population of 179 million—30 percent of the American population.

According to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, the highly lethal China-Mexico fentanyl nexus is a sophisticated enterprise of illicit trafficking of precursor ingredients and refined product, as well as money laundering designed to evade authorities at all levels of government. Drug Enforcement Agency Administrator Anne Milgram stated, “Today, drug cartels in Mexico are mass-producing fentanyl and methamphetamine largely sourced from chemicals in China, and they’re distributing these substances throughout the United States. We are finding these deadly drugs in every state; in cities, suburbs, rural areas, and local communities spanning the country.”

As recently as December 2022, the DEA announced it seized “more than 379 million potentially deadly doses of fentanyl.” This is enough to kill the entire population of the United States and Canada.

The Director of National Intelligence’s 2024 Annual Threat Assessment notes that “Mexico-based TCOs (transnational criminal organizations) are the dominant producers of illicit fentanyl for the US market and that China remains the primary source for illicit fentanyl precursor chemicals and pill pressing equipment.” However, the report offers no explanation for the 76,725 fentanyl deaths in 2023.

This is more than just transactional narco-crime. It is a complex and deliberate example of gray zone warfare. Twenty-five years ago, two Chinese People’s Liberation Army colonels penned Unrestricted Warfare, which proposed asymmetric tactics for China to “fight a non-military war.”

The book describes a potential attack vector as “drug warfare,” which is “obtaining sudden and huge illicit profits by spreading disaster in other countries.” In other words, the trafficking of lethal fentanyl allows China to weaken the fabric of American society, burden the United States with $1.5 trillion in annual costs, and potentially kill catastrophic numbers of American citizens. This is done without firing a single shot. Colonel Qiao Liang wrote, “The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”

China and the US have different approaches to counternarcotics cooperation. While the US tries to keep it separate and distinct from the overall bilateral geostrategic relationship, China views its counternarcotics cooperation as subordinate to its quid pro quo geostrategic relations. As the rapport between the two countries worsens, China’s willingness to cooperate with or acquiesce to the US on counternarcotics efforts decreases. This was demonstrated when China “formally suspended bilateral counternarcotics cooperation in August 2022, in response to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.”

A Solution 

It is time to address the fentanyl scourge with a new approach. First, the American government must acknowledge the China-Mexico fentanyl crisis for what it is—gray zone warfare. The 2022 National Defense Strategy describes gray zone methods as “coercive approaches that may fall below perceived thresholds for US military action and across areas of responsibility of different parts of the US government.”

Gray zone actions are performed by actors seeking to challenge or violate international customs, norms, and laws in pursuit of their national security interests without provoking a direct military response. Moreover, gray zone attacks from foreign powers can challenge national stability by exploiting societal divides and domestic vulnerabilities to destabilize or undermine societal harmony or confidence.

This risk is not limited to cyber-attacks upon critical infrastructure or terrorist attacks in American cities. Simply viewing the fentanyl crisis strictly from a criminal point of view limits responses to the law enforcement tool. Acknowledging the fentanyl crisis as a form of warfare will allow the integrated responses of the military to proactively engage the threat and begin to execute a real deterrence strategy for the future.

Second, it’s time to declare fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction (WMD). The federal government defines a WMD as “any weapon that is designed, intended, or has the capability to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of persons through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors.” We can all agree that the potential death of 80 percent of America’s population meets these criteria.

In 2019, the Trump administration considered but declined to declare fentanyl a WMD, instead declaring the opioid crisis a public health emergency. In 2021, the Biden administration issued an executive order declaring a national emergency with respect to international trafficking of illicit narcotics, including fentanyl.

Congress recently introduced HR 7190 “to require the Assistant Secretary for the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office of the Department of Homeland Security to treat illicit fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction and for other purposes.” Designating fentanyl as a WMD would elevate the threat of fentanyl to the American people from criminal behavior to a national security threat status and from a narco-trafficking burden to a class of gray zone warfare.

Third, the United States, a member of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, also known as the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), must designate fentanyl as a chemical weapon. To do this, the CWC definition of chemical weapon, which includes toxic chemicals that “can cause death, temporary incapacitation, or permanent harm to humans,” including their precursors, must be updated to include — intent.

Many CWC and WMD thinkers remain focused on traditional weaponized chemical munitions rather than the weaponization of synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, for the intentional exploitation or purpose of attacking a person or group or for spreading discord. Whether the attack vector is a 105-millimeter mustard gas munition or sold on the streets of America through the Chinese-sponsored fentanyl pipeline, the intent is the same: to kill.

Congressman David Trone (D-MD) declared in 2022 that China was “critically involved in the 64,000 deaths we had because they are pretty much the lone supplier of [fentanyl] precursor chemicals, which they are shipping to Mexico.” This is corroborated by the 2024 Annual Threat Assessment and the FBI director’s testimony.

Of the over 107,000 deaths-by-overdose in 2022, 68 percent were attributed to synthetic opioids like fentanyl. This is almost double the number of traffic fatalities for the same year. Since dead customers are not repeat customers, the motive is not profit but death and societal destruction through the calculated use of gray zone warfare.

America embarked on a twenty-year war on terror after 2,977 people were killed by a single terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Fentanyl “has killed more Americans than the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam Wars combined” and one kilogram of fentanyl is enough to kill 500,000 people.

Despite recent sanctioning of 25 China-based companies and individuals allegedly involved in the production of chemicals used to make fentanyl, China appears disinclined to actually stop precursor exports. As Attorney General Merrick Garland stated, “We know that this global fentanyl supply chain, which ends with the deaths of Americans, often starts with chemical companies in China.”

Treating fentanyl as a national security threat would allow a truly integrated approach to first combating and then deterring the drug with a Department of Defense response. It is time to hold China accountable for an activity emanating from within its borders. After all, the United States has gone to war for far fewer deaths.

Col. Curtis McGiffin (U.S. Air Force, Ret.) is Vice President for Education at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies and visiting professor at Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

It’s Time to Declare Fentanyl a National Security Threat was originally published on Global Security Review.