As the conflict progressed, international supporters—including hacktivists in Europe and the United States, and Anonymous via its latest Freedom Op, #OpLibya—helped coordinate humanitarian aid, disseminated information on displaced persons and logistics needs, and organized operations to smuggle Western journalists, supplies, and activists into Libya. Many of these—including Christopher Stevens, the future U.S. ambassador to Libya (later killed in the September 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks)—landed at night from boats on the Mediterranean coast.94 The fact that Libya’s population is spread out along the country’s 1,100-mile coastline made it virtually impossible for the regime to block access to rebel-held areas from the sea, and this allowed the rebels to move people and supplies around, giving them access to seaborne support and the ability to maneuver, especially once NATO’s blockade began, denying sea space to the regime. Along with the Mediterranean sanctuary, the virtual networks of international support represented a complete logistical, informational, and command-and-control hinterland for the uprising, providing instant strategic depth as the movement gathered momentum. They later remotely organized medical supplies, aid convoys, and an entire hospital ship that came in under fire to dock at the port of Misurata during the siege of the city.
The “air war” in Libya was thus far from merely an Egypt- or Tunisia-style propaganda battle: it was becoming the command-and-control backbone for the uprising, helping synchronize and coordinate the combat power of a diverse group of nonstate actors. This allowed a diverse movement of small groups, spread across several coastal cities, to act in a unified manner against the regime, making this a true case of network-enabled insurgency. Access to sea-based resupply and to globalized electronic connectivity for these urban populations in Libya’s coastal cities was creating a virtual theater that mobilized nonstate supporters of the uprising from all over the world.
The Electronic Levée en Masse
In this sense, Libya was one of the earliest and clearest examples of what Audrey Kurth Cronin calls the electronic levée en masse. In 2006, she argued that digital connectivity was changing the process of mass mobilization in warfare, enabling “a mass networked mobilization that emerges from cyberspace with a direct impact on physical reality. Individually accessible, ordinary networked communications such as personal computers, DVDs, videotapes, and cell phones are altering the nature of human social interaction, thus also affecting the shape and outcome of domestic and international conflict.”95
In a prescient article, written five years before the Arab uprisings, Cronin pointed out that “modern” warfare—state-based, industrialized total war involving massive national mobilization—dates from the American and French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, and from the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars that followed. This was a period of mass movements, democratic uprisings, and urban insurgencies against authoritarian regimes, with strong similarities to the Arab uprisings we’re examining here. The hallmark of modern warfare, in Cronin’s analysis, was “a fundamental shift from dynastic warfare between kings to mass participation of the populace in national warfare.”96 Enabling this shift was a capability—pioneered by French revolutionary leaders in 1793, exploited by Napoleon in his conquests across Europe, and later copied by others to compete with him—to mobilize, manipulate, and control an enormous population. This capability (known as the levée en masse) rested on a rapid expansion and democratization of communications technology: an analog equivalent of the democratization of digital connectivity that we’re experiencing today. As Cronin argued, “the French populace was reached, radicalized, educated, and organized so as to save the revolution and participate in its wars. It is no accident that the rise of mass warfare coincided with a huge explosion in the means of communication, particularly a dramatic growth in the number of common publications such as journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and other short-lived forms of literature. No popular mobilization could have succeeded in the absence of dramatically expanding popular communications.”97
Cronin rightly predicted the profound implications of this shift, pointing to “a democratization of communications, an increase in public access, a sharp reduction in cost, a growth in frequency, and an exploitation of images to construct a mobilizing narrative” as key new elements.98 All these elements were apparent in the Arab uprisings of 2011. Beyond its political mobilizing effect, however, as we’ve observed in several examples already, this enhanced connectivity is enabling an ongoing diffusion—a democratization and decentralization—of military coordination, logistics, and intelligence functions that were traditionally centralized and state-owned. This allows nonstate armed groups of all kinds, as well as noncombatant civilians, to establish distributed, remotely based command and control systems. These in turn can support self-synchronized swarming tactics (as in Mumbai or Mogadishu). Lacking a centralized “brain,” these systems are invulnerable to attacks from conventional armed forces.
The process of diffusion, enabled by globalized connectivity, is thus allowing civil society and nonstate groups to play the same game of remote warfare that developed states are playing, albeit with very different tools. It puts a sharp point on Marshall McLuhan’s 1970 prediction that “World War III is a guerrilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation”99—and, we might add, no division between domestic and international space, meaning that activists (such as Stephanie Lamy, who supported the uprising from Paris, or Steen Kirby in his high school in Georgia) were virtually in theater in Libya, much as Predator pilots are virtually in theater in Afghanistan. Increased connectivity has placed this electronic levée en masse capability directly into the hands of the ordinary citizen—provided, of course, that he or she lives in a place with access to electricity, cellphone service, and the Internet, or among a population with the technical know-how to reestablish such connectivity if interrupted (in other words, probably in a major city). In Libya’s cities, the levée en masse had allowed the intifada by this time to escalate to full-scale, urban, networked insurgency, with rebels seizing several cities across the country.
“Open the Arsenals”
The first and largest of these was Benghazi. The first Western journalist to reach the city, Martin Chulov of the Guardian, found scenes of utter carnage and chaos when he arrived on February 22. Chulov reported that (just as in Tunisia, and later in Syria) the regime’s control had begun to collapse when soldiers fired on mourners at a funeral close to the main military base. “The people were leading a funeral march past the big roundabout and people from inside the base opened fire,” one protestor told Chulov. “They went home, gathered themselves and came back. This is what happened.”100
What happened was a full-scale urban battle. Seizing earthmoving equipment from nearby construction sites, and armed with AK-47s and RPGs captured from security forces during the past week’s fighting, enraged protestors mounted a direct assault on the base, using bulldozers to create breaches in the perimeter walls, through which they streamed into the compound. Other protestors, alerted by social media, cellphone calls, or text messages, grabbed weapons and moved to the sound of the guns, joining the battle in a continuous flow of ad hoc reinforcements coming in from all directions. Regime troops set up a Soviet-made 23 mm anti-aircraft gun in ground defense mode and poured hundreds of explosive shells into the crowd of attackers, killing many, but to no avail—people were soon inside the base, seizing weapons, setting fire to the barracks, and slaughtering troops and police in a frenzy of retaliatory bloodletting. They soon moved on to the Mukhabarat headquarters, killing many secret police on the spot, arresting some, and beating others to death; a few members of the Mukhabarat tried—usually unsuccessfully—to save their skins by defecting.
In the ground war, the Ultras were playing their familiar role as hard-core shock troops of the street protests, but this time many other groups of young men, organized by tribe or district, were swarming to j
oin the intifada. There was also a regional twist, with Benghazi soccer fans avenging themselves for years of abuse at the hands of the regime. Gaddafi had tried to associate himself with Libyan soccer, despite little real interest in sports. He emblazoned quotes from his Green Book on stadiums across the country, “including the notion that both weapons and sports belong to the people. He appointed his son [Al-Saadi] head of the Libyan Football Federation. Al-Saadi placed himself in the starting lineup of the Ahly club of Tripoli and pursued a stormy rivalry with the Ahly club of Benghazi.”101 In 2000, Al-Saadi blatantly rigged several soccer matches to favor his own team; when Benghazi officials protested, he imprisoned them, relegated Benghazi to the Libyan league’s second division, and burned the club’s headquarters to the ground.102 This mirrored, on the sports field, the injustice Cyrenaicans felt in political and economic life. A decade later, it was payback time: as in Tunisia and Egypt, Ultras became the vanguard of the street fighting, and contributed to several of the ad hoc militias that emerged as the uprising continued.103
As mentioned earlier, the presence of black African mercenaries working for the regime, hundreds of whom had been flown into an air base outside the city over the preceding two weeks, provided a further, racially tinged source of irritation for the rebels. Gaddafi had always thought and spoken of himself as an African (not solely Arab) leader and supported revolutionaries across the continent, but many Libyans from the heavily populated, predominantly Arab coastal areas found this offensive, looking to the Arab world for their identity.104 Many mercenaries were found dead inside the barracks when the fighting ended, and others were arrested. Gaddafi’s “use of mercenaries appears to have tipped the hand of many protestors and [defecting] armed forces. ‘That is why we turned against the government,’ said Air Force major Rajib Feytouni. ‘That and the fact that there was an order to use planes to attack the people.”105 By the time Chulov arrived two days after the fall of the base, the city was firmly in rebel hands:
Residents who would not have dared to approach the town’s main military base without an invitation were doing victory laps around it in their cars. Every barrack block inside had been torched and looted. . . . All day defecting troops and officers were lugging in thousands of pounds of ammunition to a courtyard inside the secret police headquarters on Benghazi’s waterfront. By the day’s end an arsenal that could easily supply an army brigade was piled up. There were plastic explosives, rockets, machine guns and even the anti-aircraft weapon that was used to mow down demonstrators as they assaulted the military base on Sunday. Evidence of the carnage it caused was clear on the walls of nearby buildings and in the mortuaries. . . . This was a savage rampage on both sides, a blood and guts revolution, fuelled by decades of repression, neglect and rage. Neighbourhood Watch–like groups, all armed with AK-47s, manned checkpoints in and out of all the towns. But every military and police post for 360 miles had been abandoned. The scattering of the police was leading to claims of victory and the feeling of triumphalism among many of the city’s young people.106
But Gaddafi had no plans to accept the loss of Benghazi (and with it, control over 25 percent of Libya’s population and much of its oil revenue): he began to gather forces, including tanks, outside the city for a counterattack. This was no surprise for the rebels. A twenty-four-year-old student told Martin Chulov: “If [Gaddafi] feels he is cornered he will come for us. Those roads you came in on may be clear, but you did not see who is hiding over the hills?”107 Gaddafi’s intent wasn’t just to recapture Benghazi. He also planned to make an example of the city, to cow the rest of Libya’s population and teach Cyrenaicans a lesson in brutality they would never forget. This counterattack—or, more accurately, its effect on international opinion via social media—would be the turning point of the war.
Within days of the liberation of Benghazi, the intifada had spread across the country. All of Cyrenaica was lost to the regime, the important harbor cities of Ra’s Lanuf and Brega had fallen to the uprising, western towns such as az-Zawiya were in revolt, and Berber-majority cities including Yefren, Zintan, and Jadu were in rebel hands. By February 25 the uprising was in full swing in Tripoli itself, with violence in many urban districts, regime gunmen in unmarked cars shooting protestors, corpses and burned-out vehicles littering the streets, and unarmed demonstrations giving way to street battles with rifles, RPGs, and grenades. President Gaddafi appeared in Green Square to taunt the protestors and threatened to “open the arsenals.”108 In reality, the dictator had bunkered down in his compound at Bab al-Azizya, emerging only occasionally to make bizarrely unrealistic speeches to a group of Western journalists held under tight regime control in Tripoli. More military officers and some whole units had defected, and intense fighting had broken out in Misurata, Libya’s third-largest city and business capital, a hundred miles east of Tripoli along the coast road. Libya’s diplomats at the UN in Geneva and envoys in France, Australia and Bangladesh had defected, and now claimed to represent the rebels. Perhaps the most important defection was that of the entire Libyan delegation to the Arab League, members of whom—like other defectors—called for international intervention to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.109
This defection, alongside Gaddafi’s loss of control over at least half the country, encouraged the Arab League and the United Nations to support military intervention, while the United States and others froze Libya’s financial assets and the International Criminal Court announced it would investigate the regime’s crimes.110 These diplomatic moves eventually resulted in the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1973 on March 17, 2011. The resolution, under Chapter 7 of the UN charter—the authority that allows the United Nations to conduct armed, coercive peace enforcement operations, rather than “blue helmet”–style peacekeeping—called for an immediate cease-fire and authorized the international community to establish a no-fly zone and use “all means necessary short of foreign occupation” to protect civilians.111 This, along with pressure from Australia, France, Great Britain, and the United States, cleared the way for intervention by NATO.
Two days later, Gaddafi’s troops moved on Benghazi. After protesting the UN resolution as a “crusader” and “colonial” intrusion into Libya’s sovereignty, Gaddafi declared a cease-fire and claimed he was halting his troops, who had been making steady progress toward Benghazi in a series of bloody battles in towns along the coast road. But then on the morning of March 19, his forces began bombarding Benghazi and moved into the outskirts of the city from the west, with armor and infantry columns supported by air strikes.
Western media and NGOs had set themselves up in the city over the previous month but now fled in large numbers toward the Egyptian border, as did many Benghazi residents, who rightly expected a bloodbath when the assault reached the city center. One member of the rebel council, who returned from the diaspora when the uprising began, told me that she stood at the entrance to the rebel headquarters, in tears, as the foreigners left. Many had become her friends over past weeks and were reluctant to go; several asked her, “What can we do to help you?” Fully expecting to die, knowing that the departure of foreign observers would give the regime space for unrestrained vengeance once the city fell, she told them: “Tell our story. Tell what happened here, so people will know that someone dared to stand up to Gaddafi.”112 For her, it felt like the end of the world.
The world didn’t end, at least not that day: the regime’s assault never reached the city center. While the armored columns were still on the city’s outskirts, NATO intervened with massive air strikes, launching more than a hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles from ships offshore, and sending strike aircraft to attack Libyan army units, Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli, air defense systems and other regime installations. The NATO operation was a classic example of evolved, light-footprint littoral warfare in an urbanized environment. It used a mix of amphibious ships, submarines, and aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, a sea blockade, Predators operating overhea
d, land-based aircraft flying from Europe and the Middle East, sea-based attack helicopters from ships offshore, and a limited ground presence in Libya’s coastal cities. NATO ground forces kept an extremely low profile during the operation, inserting only a very small number—a few dozen at most—of special forces operators, military advisors, intelligence personnel, search-and-rescue personnel, and joint attack controllers (specialists in directing air and naval strikes) from several NATO and Arab countries.113 Ultimately, over 222 days, NATO and allied aircraft from fifteen countries flew 9,600 strike missions against more than six thousand targets.114
These strikes helped the rebels push back and ultimately defeat the Gaddafi regime. This took months, with many ups and downs—towns such as Brega and Ajdabiya changed hands several times, there was a long and brutal siege in Misurata, and fighting in the Nafusa Mountains (around towns including Yefren) seesawed back and forth for many weeks. The fighting consisted almost entirely of battles to control coastal cities and petroleum infrastructure, and of fighting on the coastal highway and the inland connecting roads between these cities and port facilities. The intervention wasn’t without its problems—NATO forces bombed rebel columns in error on at least one occasion, and accidentally struck a critical trans-Sahara water pipeline on another.115 But NATO air support changed the balance of the conflict within days, relieving the rebels of pressure from Gaddafi’s tanks and aircraft, leveling the military balance between the regime and the rebel fighters, and allowing them to gradually expand their initial footholds.
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