I've followed John Robb's website Global Guerrillas for a while, but I always felt like I was missing some foundational pieces of the puzzle; I read interesting nuggets of information on the site, but was missing the overall framework to put them together. So I finally ordered his 2007 book Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization. It's a quick, easy read but packed with interesting ideas.
Robb argues that we are facing a global open-source insurgency, which allows "nonstate networks to challenge the structure and order of nation-states." These global guerrillas use "systems disruption" to halt the engine of globalization. Because our globalized world is so complex and interdependent, insurgents can launch simple, inexpensive attacks that cause cascading failures through networks. A $2,000 attach on oil pipelines in Iraq in 2004, for example, caused $500 million in lost oil exports. States are virtually defenseless against these sorts of attacks; there are too many decentralized groups capable of executing them, the entry costs for new global guerrillas are low, and state reactions are expensive and often make things worse. A protracted war against global guerrillas is unsustainable because of relative costs; indeed, al-Qaeda's grand strategy has been to lure the United States into bleeding wars in far-away lands. Robb calls this "superpower baiting."
Robb argues that the best defense against "global guerrillas" is to build resilience into our networks. We cannot identify and stop every attack; we must expect that they will occur. We should continue to fight these open source insurgencies with all the tools at our disposal, but we should simultaneously fortify our networks to survive disruptive attacks. Robb defines survival as "the ability to dynamically mitigate and dampen system shocks." Consolidating power in a centralized, knee-jerk police state is the wrong response; instead, states must decentralize power and control. Robb is big on things like local food and power production, private security and disaster response capabilities, and crowdsourcing. On his website he follows trends like the US's unsustainable economic problems, transnational crime/terrorism, and conflicts between states and disruptive guerrilla groups around the world.
My recent post titled Warnings from Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction was partly based on Robb's ideas about social disruption and resilience. I'm not worried about alien invasions, but I am worried about our resilience to disruptive events and the breakdown of effective governance.
Here are some of the other things I'm thinking about after reading the book.
1. Robb shows how easy it is for an individual or small community to obtain the means of terrible violence. He writes, "The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct warfare has finally been breached, and we are only starting to feel its effects... this threshold will finally reach its culmination--with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win."
There's a great science fiction novel lurking in there, but as audacious as it sounds, Robb is right. Superempowered individuals will only get more powerful as technology improves and proliferates. Look at what bombers can do with explosives, or what hackers can do with computers; what will superempowered individuals be able to do with biologically engineered viruses or self-replicating nanomachines? What do terms like "war" and "security" mean when any individual with an Internet connection, a garage, and some free time can unleash mass destruction? Are we condemned to a future of random, unchecked violence? Will an uneasy stability like Mutually Assured Destruction arise between individuals? Or....
2. ... will life go on as normal? Robb shows how easy it is for a disgruntled individual or team to disrupt modern networks. What he doesn't convincingly show, in my opinion, is that very many people will have the motive to do so. At least in the developed world, most people have a stake in the operation of the system. Not many people desire the collapse of their infrastructure, economy, and government. Will global insurgency really be attractive, or will people be too busy living their lives and participating in the global economy to declare war on the system?
3. If the "crowd" is so effective at attacking and destabilizing states, can the crowd play a role in the defense and/or counterattack? I've mused about crowdsourcing security here and here. Given that the vast majority of people in a society care about preserving their lives and the system, perhaps there are ways we can harness them to help provide for their own security. Everybody these days carries a cell phone that is also a complex sensor platform capable of shooting pictures or video or recording audio. If you could weave these together and identify the useful information, you could create a vast intelligence network that would identify threats, alert relevant authorities, coordinate responses, and provide on-the-ground intelligence to responders. Robb has broader ideas of the role that the crowd can play. They can grow their own food, contribute locally produced power to the electrical grid, or offer privatized security or disaster response services.
4. My biggest critique of the book is that it considers this "global guerrillas" trend in isolation. Society and war are always evolving in complex, diverse ways. Robb is spot-on in identifying this trend towards network-disruption by open source insurgent groups, but it is only one trend out of many. Much of the discussion in the US military about conventional war vs. counterinsurgency vs. hybrid war revolves around the complex ways war is evolving.
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