Thanks to everyone who alerted me to the Slate series Searching for Saddam, which describes how refocusing the militaries attention at Saddam’s social network—rather than his military hierarchy—was critical in his ultimate capture.
Amid all that disaster, the capture of Saddam Hussein has become a forgotten success story. It’s an accomplishment that wasn’t inevitable. In a five-part series that begins today, I’ll explain how a handful of innovative American soldiers used the same theories that underpin Facebook to hunt down Saddam Hussein. I’ll also look at how this hunt was a departure in strategy for the military, why its techniques aren’t deployed more often, and why social-networking theory hasn’t helped us nab Osama Bin Laden.
The series began yesterday and will finish on Friday, and as such I will withhold comment until I have read the entire piece. Thus far; however, it has been a fascinating account of the people and who promoted network science, and why it was so critical for tracking Saddam. That said, I was a bit dismayed by the phrase, “theories that underpin Facebook,” from the above quotation. If, in fact, it turns out that the military was relying on Facebook level network theory then one could easily understand why those techniques have been unsuccessful in narrowing the search for bin Laden.
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