Nidal Hasan is scheduled to die by firing squad at Fort Hood on December 3.
Legally, this is pretty simple. Hasan murdered 13 people and attempted to murder 32 more. A military jury convicted him and sentenced him to death. He didn’t exactly leave behind a great whodunit, either. Hasan acknowledged responsibility at trial and claimed he attacked American soldiers to protect Islamic insurgents from U.S. forces.
But military planners are supposed to think beyond the first move.
First-order effect: Hasan is executed.
Second-order effect: Americans see justice finally carried out seventeen years after Fort Hood. Victory!
Third-order effect: What does the rest of the world see? Do we lose control of the narrative?
Welcome to information warfare, where perception can become operational reality.
Hasan didn’t describe himself as some confused workplace employee who suddenly snapped. But, that’s the narrative you were supposed to believe.
The ultimate dream a of Osama and his buddies, a worldwide caliphate. Bin Laden’s Long War was the strategy: push America out of the Muslim world, overthrow the governments left behind, build a transnational caliphate, and ultimately expand it. Terrorism was never the end state. It was a tool for getting there.
Hasan believed he was participating in the larger struggle. He even told military mental-health evaluators that if the United States executed him, he could “still be a martyr.” His standby attorneys became concerned during the trial that his almost nonexistent defense was actually an attempt to obtain the death penalty.
Now think like the enemy for five minutes.
An American Army firing squad. On an American Army installation. Executing a Muslim who claimed he had taken the other side in a religious and military struggle.
We know what that means in American law: a convicted mass murderer receiving the sentence imposed by a lawful court-martial. Justice is served.
But that’s not necessarily the video somebody will see in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Indonesia or a thousand corners of the internet.
A propagandist doesn’t need context. Context is actually rather inconvenient.
He needs fifteen seconds of video, a photograph, a dramatic headline and a martyr.
Suddenly the story isn’t “America executes convicted murderer.”
It becomes: “American soldiers execute Muslim warrior.”
That is precisely why second- and third-order effects matter. That’s exactly what he wants.
Wars aren’t fought exclusively with rifles, tanks, aircraft and artillery anymore. Frankly, they never were. Human beings have been fighting information wars since the first caveman exaggerated the size of the tribe on the other side of the hill.
Today we simply gave the caveman Wi-Fi.
One execution can therefore produce two completely different realities simultaneously.
To Americans, Hasan may represent justice finally arriving seventeen years late.
To jihadist propagandists, Hasan can be repackaged as something entirely different: evidence that the United States is waging the very religious war Hasan claimed he was already fighting.
That doesn’t mean America shouldn’t execute him. It means America should understand the information battlefield before the rifles fire.
Because once the shots are fired, Washington doesn’t get exclusive ownership of what they mean. One narrative will dominate.
Hasan understands that.
He openly contemplated martyrdom.
Our enemies understand it.
The question is whether we do.
Every military decision produces effects. Then those effects produce effects of their own.
That’s second- and third-order thinking.
And in the modern information war, sometimes the most important battlefield isn’t Fort Hood.
It’s the story told about Fort Hood five minutes later.
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