(4) Iraq has...become a testing ground, a dry run for something much larger. Unlike previous insurgencies, the one in Iraq comprises seventy-five to one hundred small, diverse, and autonomous groups of zealots, patriots, and criminals alike. These groups, of course, have access to many of the same tools we do - from satellite phones to engineering degrees - and they use them every bit as effectively. But their single most important asset is their organizational structure, an open-source community network - one that seems to me quite similar to what we see in the software industry. That's how they're able to continually stay one step ahead of us. It is an extremely innovative structure, sadly, and it results in decision-making cycles much shorter than those of the U.S. military. Indeed, because the insurgents in Iraq lack a recognizable center of gravity - a leadership structure or an ideology - they are nearly immune to the application of conventional military force. Like Microsoft, the software superpower, the United States hasn't found its match in a Goliath competitor similar to itself, but in a loose, self-tuning network.
John Robb
Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization by John Robb
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007
ISBN 978-0-471-78079-3
There is a lot in this book that needs to be studied. John Robb of Global Guerrillas breaks down the worldwide rise of technologically empowered factions like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah which are able to fight the USA and Israel to a standstill. This is open source warfare with a ubiquitous and virtual battlefield. The handwriting's been on the wall since at least the Tokyo subway gas attack by Aum Shinrikyo.
Wal-mart globalism has brought mass lethality down to the street gang level and we now have to live with that. John Robb has a good grasp on how it seems to be working and what that means. War is serious business in some new and very scarey ways. We must study war to make sure there's war no more.
(4-6) In Iraq, we've also witnessed the convergence of international crime and terrorism as they provide ample fuel and a global platform for these new enemies. Al-Qaeda's attack on Madrid, for example, was funded by the sale of the drug ecstasy. Moises Naim, a former Venezuelan minister of trade and industry and the editor and publisher of the magazine Foreign Policy, documented this trend in his insightful book Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy. Globalization has fostered the development of a huge criminal economy that boasts a technologically leveraged global supply chain (like Wal-Mart's) and can handle everything from human trafficking (eastern Europe) to illicit drugs (Asia and South America), pirated goods (Southeast Asia), arms (Central Asia), and money laundering (everywhere). Naim puts the value of that economy at between $2 and $3 trillion a year. He says it is expanding at seven times the rate of legitimate world trade.
The terrorist-criminal symbiosis becomes even more powerful when considered next to the most disturbing sign coming out of Iraq: the terrorists have developed the ability to fight nation-states strategically - without weapons of mass destruction. This new method is called systems disruption, a simple way of attacking the critical networks (electricity, oil, gas, water, communications, and transportation) that underpin modern life. Such disruptions are designed to erode the target state's legitimacy, to drive it to failure by keeping it from providing the services it must deliver in order to command the allegiance of its citizens. Over the past two years, attacks on the oil and electricity networks in Iraq have reduced and held delivery of these critical services below prewar levels, with a disastrous effect on the country, its people, and its economy.
The early examples of systems disruption in Iraq and elsewhere are ominous. If these techniques are even lightly applied to the fragile electrical and oil-gas systems in Russia, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere in the target-rich West, we could see a rapid onset of economic and political chaos unmatched since the advent of the blitzkrieg. (India's January arrest of militants with explosives in Hyderabad suggests that the country's high-tech industry could be a new target). It's even worse when we consider the asymmetry of the economics involved: one small attack on an oil pipeline in southeast Iraq, conducted for an estimated $2,000, cost the Iraqi government more than $500 million in lost oil revenues. That is a return on investment of 25 million percent.
Now that the tipping point has been reached, the rise of global virtual states - with their thriving criminal economies, innovative networks, and hyperefficient war craft - will rapidly undermine public confidence in our national-security systems. In fact, this process has already begun. We've seen disruption of our oil supply in Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Colombia; the market's fear of more disruptions contributes mightily to the current high prices for oil. As these disruptions continue, the damage will spill over into the very structure of our society. Our profligate U.S. Department of Defense, reeling from its inability to defend our borders on 9/11 or to pacify even a small country like Iraq, will increasingly be seen as obsolete.
Add in one or more loss like New Orleans,tsunami, or earthquake event every few years plus the usual recent various infrastructural collapses like bridges, dams, and levees, materials scarcities like peak oil or even water, possible climate change(s) and al-Qaeda, a black swan, some joker, or the Spanish Inquisition. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Still, Solar IS Civil Defense from and for Global Guerrillas and a Solar Swadeshi can be the practice of peace.