Reminiscent of attacks on the Italian state during the 1970’s and 1980’s by leftist Red Brigades and Mafia, the drug cartels of Mexico are hobbled neither by antiquated Marxist ideology nor old-time, rustic, crime family traditions. They are adaptive, professional, transnational in outlook and far better equipped than state police forces on either side of the border. Mexico’s corrupt political elite by contrast, cannot be bothered to restrain their greed enough to properly pay, train and arm the very security forces that defend their primacy.

Those cartels already are a shadow / parallel government. Imagine the power they could have 5-10 years from now as the greedhead elites continue to abdicate their responsibility.

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Many of the Web 2.0 crowd are clearly smart, but what they do is far removed from the current focal point of global change. As a result, indulging in clever Web 2.0 thinking is akin to eating intellectual fast food, it satisfies but its clearly not good for you.

This is why I bailed on thinking about techy topics after helping to get blogs (which turned into Web 2.0 later) going back in 2001/2002. The most important global changes are going on is much deeper in the stack now.

Inded, much of the planet doesn’t have reliable water, much less electricity. So, the latest shiny web 2.0 widget, however wondrous, is of use to only a tiny fraction of the world’s population.

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John McCain strikes a blow for free speech.

No, hang on. Sorry, that should be “strikes a blow against free speech”.

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John Robb on how small terrorist attacks can disrupt an entire system.

The networks of our global superinfrastructure are tightly “coupled”—so tightly interconnected, that is, that any change in one has a nearly instantaneous effect on the others. Attacking one network is like knocking over the first domino in a series: it leads to cascades of failure through a variety of connected networks, faster than human managers can respond.

(Sounds like the current credit crisis, doesn’t it? An seemingly minor number of subprime mortgages defaulted and that triggered the cascades of failure.)

But it’s not just terroist attacks like 9/11 that concern Robb, it’s the power of street gangs in cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where they are powerful enough to challenge the authorities for dominance. He doesn’t see nukes being used as weapons because they are too difficult to build and conceal.

The result of a nuclear explosion in Moscow or New York would very probably be the annihilation of the country that manufactured the bomb, once its identity was determined—as it surely would be, since no plot of that size can remain secret for long.

We live in an increasingly dangerous world, Robb says, and the best way to defend ourselves is to decentralize all our systems. This builds in redundancy, makes cascading failures less likely to happen, and has the happy consequence of increasing participation by everyone as well as building genuine democracy and freedom.

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From Bruce Sterling, commenting on the recent deluge of rain in Texas.

In other and even weirder Texan news, Texan state officials ignore the incompetent feds and rely on big-box commercial retail outfits to respond to weather emergencies. Can secession and the Greenhouse Republic of Wal-Mart be far behind?

If the government of a nation-state isn’t the go-to organization in public emergencies, then what core function does a government serve? We’re heading for a world where Al-Qaeda thumb-wrestles Home Depot for control of the streets.

Texas Tells FEMA: Don’t Mess

Bottom line up front: “FEMA can’t compete with the private sector,” Jack Colley, Texas’ chief of emergency management, said. “They do it quicker, smarter, faster every day.”

This is a telling example of what John Robb discusses in Brave New War, that the US government is becoming hollowed out and increasingly unable to provide services to the public because of its preoccupation with terrorism and invading other countries. Such hollowing out is a stated goal of al Qaeda.

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Pakistan from the about-to-be-launched new insurgency aimed at the government and Mexico, well, the story starts with $217 million found in a drug dealer’s home he says was for the president of Mexico.

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John Robb, author of Brave New War, in a Spot Report inteview

Remember, a major reason for 9/11 was to get the US into a guerrilla war in Asia and repeat the experience of Russia’s Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan war was a major factor in the collapse of the USSR, as the military and financial cost was overwhelming, and crippled them. In one of those bizarre twists of blowback, the CIA heavily funded mujahadeem (including bin Laden) to fight against the USSR in Afghanistan, only to have those battle-hardened veterans of combat morph into al Qaeda and other such groups years later.

Robb’s crucial point, and I believe al Qaeda has said it too, is that 9/11 was a deliberate attempt to sucker the US into a conflict that will drag down and bankrupt it. And Bush, arrogant twit that he is, walked right into the trap.

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Shloky notes that John Robb’s new book, Brave New War, has gotten just one major media review yet is #214 on Amazon best sellers now.

Blog reviews, and there’s been many of them (including here), are what’s helping the book sell.

Given that the book is selling - #214 on Amazon - this is indicative of how bottom-up this evolution is. Snazzy.

I just checked Amazon, and the book is now #29. This is new media and blogs at their best, flying under and around the mainstream, getting important new ideas out there.

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The organic emergence of terrorist groups, whose only connection to al Qaeda is through the media, shouldn’t come as a surprise. We will see this again and again. One reason is that in open source warfare, the barriers to entry are nearly zero. Anyone can participate. All you need to do in order to join, is to act.

Even if you are a dimbulb… But dimbulbs can do serious damage too. As many have pointed out, these clueless wannabes were caught by old-fashioned police work, not by Orwellian governmental monitoring. Since it was a solo operation, there is no food chain for police to work up to find the ringleaders. That is the nature of OSW.

More OSW. Chevron shuts down multiple operations in Nigeria due to attacks by insurgents. If Chevron is forced to keep them shut down for a while, or has to shut down more facilities, the price of oil will certainly rise.

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It’s just fiction, it couldn’t happen, right?

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In Brave New War, John Robb details how nation-states are becoming “hollowed out”, with their resources, money and energy being diverted into unwinnable conflicts and turmoil. He sees nation-states becoming vastly more decentralized as they are forced to adapt to cope with open source warfare attacks, transnational gangs, as well as the vast and unstoppable spread of technology and ideas by the Internet. To cope and thrive in a decentralized world, you need to become decentralized yourself.

There’s another decentralization of power happening too and that’s in electrical power generation. Global warming is forcing a switch to renewable sources, and that will mean a multitude of smaller generating sites using a variety of methods; solar, geothermal, wave, whatever. If a township (or Wal-Mart) is generating all their power renewably, they then become way less beholden to a central government.

So where does this leave the Left? Much of the political philosophy of the Left, whether it be liberal or socialist, posits a strong central government that can mandate and enforce control over the markets. In a decentralized world, much of that state power will be eroded. So, if you’re communist you presumably want a government that controls and manages the economy. But that can’t happen in a decentralized world.

Nor will such a world lead to increased predatory capitalism, because much of the power of the ruling class comes from their collusion with and power over the central government. If the power of the central government slips so will their power. Controlling one central entity is far easier than controlling a multitude of smaller ones.

This hollowing out doesn’t just happen in capitalist countries either. China is having severe problems managing their country. Worker revolts are on the rise, the pollution in some cities is beyond toxic, corruption is rampant. Their elite class used to completely control the economy, and it’s obvious that they no longer do. (That this at least nominally communist government now has a ruling class is a subject for another post.)

The US government response to Hurricane Katrina and the recent Kansas tornadoes definitively shows that this hollowed out government can no longer help its own citizens. That racism was certainly part of the lack of response to Katrina, it certainly wasn’t a factor in Kansas, which is overwhelmingly White. The sad truth is, the US government is so bogged down with foreign wars that it is unable to assist its own citizens in need.

So what will the response of the Left be to a newly decentralized world? We need to start thinking about it now.

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The Pentagon is shipping 35,000 more troops to Iraq while the governor of Kansas says says their tornado victims need help but there’s a shortage of National Guard because those troops are in Iraq, not Kansas.

This is a clear example of one of the aims of open source warfare, the hollowing out of the state by slowly bankrupting it and diverting its energies into wars it can’t win. When that happens, the void gets filled by corporations and other private entities who move in to do the work the government can no longer do.

We’re seeing that with global warming now, especially here in the US. Both parties and the government are asleep at the wheel, mouthing that something needs to be done, but not doing anything. That they are preoccupied by the war(s) is a given.

So who is moving in, planning to spend huge sums to remediate global warming? CitiCorp, Bank of America, and Wal-Mart, that’s who. Citi just announced they will spend 50 billion over the next ten years to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions and to fund other projects as well. BofA is doing the same with 20 billion. Wal-Mart is planning one of the biggest solar projects ever at their own stores.

“We are taking aggressive steps toward our goal of being supplied by 100 percent renewable energy,” Wal-Mart’s vice president for energy, Kim Saylors-Laster, said.

Would it be that the federal government was taking such steps. But by spending hundreds of billions on insane wars, diverting needed energy, time and money away from the country, the government itself is becoming hollowed out and unable to act quickly and effectively. So, increasingly and by default, the real players in global warming will be the mega-corporations, because only they have the money, technology, and skills to get it done.

I think Citi, BofA, and Wal-Mart genuinely get it about global warming. Too bad our government doesn’t. But it’s too preoccupied and desperate to win a war that can not be won to focus on much else. The hollowing out of the US government, a prime goal of open source warfare, continues.

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What if warfare was reinvented and nobody bothered to tell the Pentagon?

That is the thesis to John Robb’s Brave New War. Globalization, the Internet, cellphones, etc. have created a world in which information spreads very fast, can not be contained, and is available to all. This allows small, highly mobile groups working in loose networks with others to not only create open source software that benefits everyone, but also to create open source warfare whereby just a few can effectively block and cripple nation-states they oppose.

Most of the web servers on the planet run on the open source Apache software. Open source is developed for free by teams of those interested. Anyone can change the code and use it. Changes to the code are voted on by the group, then put into the next release where they benefit all. The profit motive is absent, and the software teams group, dissolve, and re-form at will, bringing their knowledge with them.

Open source warfare follows the same pattern. Using Iraq as an example, there is not one monolithic insurgency but dozens of groups with widely differing beliefs who team up, share ideas, attack a specific target, then disband and plan something else. The organizational structure here is a bazaar, not a cathedral, with lots of “trading, haggling, copying, and sharing”, something which may look chaotic to an outsider, but isn’t really at all. But the dynamics of the bazaar are probably impenetrable to rigid hierarchies like the Pentagon.

OSW also swarms when it attacks. The swarms can be massed but in Iraq are usually dispersed. That’s the key to their power. The attacks are often on the electrical grids and pipelines, where just a few people acting quickly can cause substantial damage. Repeat this often enough, and the government and the US soon appear to be completely inept (not to mention it costing them millions and maybe billions in lost revenue and repairs.) This hollowing out of the state by slow bankruptcy and loss of legitimacy is a precise goal of OSW. Insurgent attacks in Iraq may appear random, but it’s almost a certainty that most of them are deliberately planned to create maximum disruption.

Robb documents something I’ve not seen elsewhere: that Saddam, after the Gulf War, made contingency plans for another US invasion. The plans included stashing huge arms supplies in the countryside, embedding small teams of guerrillas in the cities to destabilize the government and attack US troops, and engaging in systems disruption by assaults on the infrastructure. When the invasion happened, these teams activated and were the leading edge of the insurgency. Robb’s crucial point: given the nature of OSW, what those guerrillas knew quickly and freely spread to anyone interested, who then added their own improvisations and spread it further.

Such systems disruptions can be used to bankrupt an opponent, as well as to discredit them on the world stage. It’s not just Iraq where this is happening. Robb also discusses the rise of transnational gangs, organized crime cartels, homegrown militias, and others who use similar tactics.

That the Pentagon and US government doesn’t understand OSW can be shown by reading the headlines. You’ll often see news stories about how the US has “to cut off the head of Al Qaida” and that’ll end the insurgency. No it won’t. Nor will an Orwellian security apparatus like HSA, which “will prove unable to isolate and defuse threats against us.”

Robb sees the US electrical grid as especially at risk. It’s mostly unprotected. Destroying a few key switching points could cascade much of the grid into collapse. He uses this as a metaphor for what could be done to protect as well as enhance our lives in general. Decentralization. Let every home have the capacity to create its own energy, with the excess going back into the grid. Also, open up the entire electrical system, let it become a true open source platform for all to use. Changes like these would make the entire system more robust and better able to absorb the attacks he assumes are coming.

Robb sees a open source model to be used by all as the best possible way to avoid the alternative: “knee-jerk police states” and “preemptive war,” all of which will be failed strategies anyway.

The resulting highly decentralized world, I think, will be much less a place of predatory capitalism because the interconnectedness of the networks we will live in will preclude that from being so. Also, for those of us on the Left who think socialism has much to offer, a decentralized world where nation-states have lost their power means there will be no state that can control an economy. I suggest this is something Lefties need to start thinking about now, as that decentralized world is coming.

[tags]John Robb[/tags]

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A Senate committee is investigating how to stop “extremists” from using the Internet, or least to monitor what they’re doing, even as they admit that doing so will be difficult at best. Adding to their travails, they’ve not even started doing anything, while holding investigations that demonstrate they’ve apparently got few clues indeed.

Consider these gems of cluelessness:

To Lieberman, the report demonstrates how “the internet is a weapon in the hands of our extremist enemies who use it to plot attack strategies, reach out across borders to potential terrorist recruits with targeted marketing messages and talk with each other in real time.

One wonders how many of those on the committee use the net on a daily basis or understand how it works? Anyone who lives on the net already knows it is borderless, and to say this is like saying cars run on gas. If you have to state the blindingly obvious as a potential insight, then you’ve, um, got a steep learning curve ahead.

Also, his “targeted marketing messages” implies extremists have a hierarchical organization when of course, they don’t, as they function in networks.

If the committee wants to understand how extremists use the net, they should study open source software development. It’s essentially the same process as what John Robb, in his new book Brave New War, calls open source warfare. Everyone has input. New ideas can be adopted by all. Groups form at will to do a project then disband. The profit motive isn’t important. It’s not hierarchical. For those in rigidly hierarchical D.C., these concepts must seem alien indeed.

One puzzle the report cited: “How it is that a nation that gave rise to Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue came to be outplayed in the realm of ideas, effectively communicated in the new media?”

Could it be because huge hierarchical marketing approaches have nothing to do with the topic at hand?

The group suggested several ways to help remedy the problem, including developing a “compelling counter-narrative for worldwide delivery,” doing more to promote cross-cultural dialogue and “recognize and address the need” for more behavioral research into the process of radicalization.

And what would the counter-narrative be? “We invaded Iraq based on lies, oopsie?” For a narrative to be effective, it needs to be believable or at least partially reality-based. As to why people become radicalized, try, “your assault helicopter blew up our house and killed my parents.”

Yes, I know atrocities happen on all sides. But this is asymmetrical warfare we’re talking about here. Tactics that work for guerrillas often have the opposite effect when used by the state. In Brave New War, Robb details the work of Israeli military historian and strategist Martin van Creveld.

After much study of Israel vs. its enemies, Crevald concluded that 1) when the strong fight the weak, they become weak, 2) the nation-state is in decline, 3) warfare is changing into a form that nation-states will not be able to defeat, 4) when a nation-state takes on a guerrilla movement, it will lose. Why? Because they will be seen as the strong beating up the weak, it will look terrible in the press, and will eventually led to a collapse of morale in the troops and damage the global image of the nation-state. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile Congress tries to gallop to the rescue and free the net from the evildoers but just shows their ignorance instead.

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Why is it that, in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars the U.S. has borrowed to finance its War on Terror, terrorism has steadily increased? Could it be because violence benefits chaos, rather than stability?

It’s also because the US insists that fighting terrorism must be done by using state-on-state tactics, and it’s not that kind of conflict. The US uses the wrong tactics and the wrong approach, thinking that if they can just cut off the head of whoever they deem as the Chief Evildoer this week, that terrorism will end. This totally misunderstands the tactics and organization of those the US deems as terrorist.

From the inside flap to John Robb’s new book, Brave New War

[The] evolutionary leap in the methods of warfare makes it possible for extremely small nonstate groups to fight states and possibly win on a regular basis. The use of systems disruption as a method of strategic warfare gives rise to a nightmare scenario in which any nation—including the United States—can be driven to bankruptcy by an enemy it can’t compete with economically. We are staring at a future where defeat isn’t experienced all at once but as an inevitable withering away of military, economic, and political power through wasting conflicts with minor foes.

In other words, the US can build all the Green Zones it wants in Iraq, and a few insurgents can still bring down crucial oil pipelines and the electrical grid almost at will, thus eroding the power of the government and of the US, as well as costing them millions, if not billions.

It is time, says Robb, to decentralize all of our systems, from energy and communications to security and markets. It is time for every citizen to take personal responsibility for some aspect of state security. It is time to make our systems, and ourselves, as flexible, adaptable, and resilient as the forces that are arrayed against us.

Those forces can be Islamists, transnational gangs, home-grown militias, or whatever. Their aims may differ, but the tactics and approach are the same. Small, highly mobile, loosely networked groups who inflict major damage despite their much smaller size. Robb sees the state itself as a declining force with its power worldwide starting to ebb, to be replaced by corporations, private militaries, insurgencies, regional networks, and other such decentralized organizations that will emerge in the hollowed-out structure of what used to be a state.

He uses the response to Hurricane Katrina as a telling example. The government wasn’t able to respond quickly. Instead, who was on the ground quickly, offering huge support? Wal-Mart and Blackwater, that’s who. Wal-Mart used their huge logistics system to get food, water, and supplies quickly to people who needed them. Blackwater private military were hired by the wealthy to protect their property and lives. Whether you loathe Blackwater isn’t the point, that they were able to get there fast and efficiently when the government couldn’t IS the point. The US government is preoccupied and probably bankrupting itself slogging through (and losing) wars it started but doesn’t understand. Which is precisely what those opposed to the US want to happen and according to Robb, have deliberately planned to happen.

That “violence benefits chaos” is precisely their goal. Robb, whose blogs I read regularly, is not right-wing, and says he doesn’t have politics or even vote. He’s more of a futurist with a background both in military special ops and high tech software startups. That we are moving towards a highly decentralized world that the US government appears clueless about is, I think, a given. Those who survive will be those who adapt.

[tags]Brave New War[/tags]

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