Some years ago I visited two villages near Gampaha, Sri Lanka. Both were small and poor. Both were inhabited by members of Rodhi caste, the Sinhalese version of untouchables. But there, all similarity ended. In the first, families of five and six lived in palm-leaf huts just large enough for them all to lie down [...]
Posts under ‘Brave New War’
4GW in Mexico
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 [...]
Intellectual fast food
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 [...]
Move On, MoveOn
John McCain strikes a blow for free speech.
No, hang on. Sorry, that should be “strikes a blow against free speech”.
The coming urban terror
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 [...]
The hollowing out of the US government
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 [...]
Pakistan and Mexico are hollowing out too
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.
9/11. Brave New War
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, [...]
Bottom up book sales
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 [...]
The Ft. Dix Six
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, [...]
The Execution Channel
It’s just fiction, it couldn’t happen, right?
Decentralization and the Left
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 [...]
Open source warfare, an example
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 [...]
Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization
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 [...]
Congress seeks to stop Net evildoers, uh huh
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 [...]
