Our foes' emerging tactics

With the global economy's rapid expansion over the past two decades, globalization has entered into an extended period of frontier integration. This forces both the West and emerging markets to radically increase the resilience of all these new networks, especially those extending into regions still largely disconnected from globalization's deep embrace, such as Africa and the Middle East.

Very bad actors capable of very bad things tend to congregate in these thinly connected regions. Using guerrilla-style tactics, they can not only frustrate our efforts at postwar reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also bring their weapons of "system disruption" eventually to the very networks and infrastructure that fuel globalization's advance.

The 9/11 attacks previewed this new form of system-focused warfare, and since that fateful day the U.S. military and government have struggled mightily to construct new operational approaches to tame and ultimately marginalize transnational terrorism. What we have lacked most in this agonizingly slow adjustment is a good description of our enemy's emerging tactics - in short, a "red team" expose of our own system vulnerabilities.

A brilliant new book published by terrorism expert John Robb, titled "Brave New War," hit stores last month with virtually no fanfare. It deserves both significant attention and vigorous debate, in large part because it makes the provocative case that "global guerrillas" using "open-source warfare" can defeat nation-states in the same way that Wikipedia has eclipsed the Encyclopedia Britannica: the innovative mind of the many outweighs the dated knowledge of the few.

In an open-source world where research on, and development of, new technologies has become nearly as accessible as the Internet itself, conflicts are increasingly decided by which side learns the fastest. The same Internet that allows your teenager to share his latest video exploits with the world also enables every Osama-wannabe to share his latest terrorist technique, creating what Robb calls the "bazaar of violence," where bleeding-edge tactics are rapidly disseminated among globalization's many extremist opponents.

Analogizing the Iraq insurgency to the 1930s Spanish Civil War, which debuted many tactics later employed in World War II, Robb argues we're glimpsing the future of terrorism designed to "hollow out" weak states on globalization's fringes and keep them in perpetual failure. Robb believes these same tactics, properly developed, can bring advanced economies to their knees.

Here's where Robb's thesis stalls, in my opinion, because it's one thing to keep a weak state in failure, but quite another thing to sow systemic chaos in advanced economies. After all, these societies advanced precisely by mastering such network complexity in the first place, typically in response to disasters and scandals that regularly perturbed their systems and thus exposed vulnerabilities.

Thankfully, transnational terrorism remains a fringe activity with virtually no impact on the global economy's performance, which has remained at an unprecedentedly high level since 2001. In contrast, the cumulative impact of system perturbations caused by manmade and natural disasters in recent years has been far more substantial, and arguably far more beneficial in triggering new rule sets designed to prevent future disruptions.

But here is where Robb's warnings are dead-on: our global connectivity races ahead of our ability to manage all its vulnerabilities. In effect, our rules haven't keep pace, and those gaps and bottlenecks become obvious targets for our enemies in this long war against radical extremism. "Hollowing out" advanced states may be a tall order, but applying just enough system disruption to torpedo an emerging market gets a whole lot easier.

Think about how much simpler it would be to generate a financial panic in China than, say, the United States. Sure, authoritarian China might be more crudely robust in handling attacks on its less-developed infrastructure, but it has nowhere near our capacity for discounting strategic risk through agile capital markets, a responsive insurance industry or a federally insured banking sector - to name a few examples.

"Brave New War" serves as a valuable guide to the forces of disconnectedness and the continuously evolving challenge they present.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is a distinguished strategist at the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tomthomaspmbarnett.com.

Interesting idea. The only problem is that the disruptive network tactics of the few only work, in circumstances where the advanced societies use kid glove tactics against civilians and insurgents.

If the U.S. used one-half the brutality that the left routinely accuses them of, there would be lines of Al Qaeda personnel at every synagogue and parish church looking to convert.

As many people have noted, the pacifism of Gandhi worked well against the liberally-minded British Empire. Mahatma would have had less success in Germany in 1940.

The Geneva Convention says that uniformed soldiers must be treated with a certain level of honor. Clandestine warriors are not covered by the Geneva Convention. However, for the most part, the US treats clandestine warriors rather well.

But if this sort of warfare succeeds in truly disrupting a modern society, I think a new Convention will be put in place. And it won't be pretty. Guerrilla warfare can certainly be stopped. But you have to have the Will to do it. If they push hard enough, we will develop the Will.

And part of the Will may involve arresting Ted Kennedy, Michael Moore and Katie Couric for treason. Heck, back in the day when Eugene Debs was a prennial Presidential candidate, he was put in prison for opposing the WWI draft. I'm not eager to see political dissent crushed -- but that would be much better than letting Islam crush the Christian West.

Why?

Where is it written that there is anything mutually exclusive about them, or anything necessarily benign about a religion?

Religions have existed on earth that required and practiced regular human sacrifice to imaginary demonic idols in the midst of thriving commercial cities in broad daylight.

Anybody under the delusion that "religion" necessarily means "warm and cuddly and nice" has to get it out of their system immediately. It has no such meaning.

The reason the west has been so feckless about militant Islam, is the west no longer understands itself, its own traditions, why it adopted tolerance as a policy, what civilization consists in or where it came from, or the real foundations of modern liberalism, let alone the cracks in those foundations.

And instead of having any coherent conversation about any of these things, we make up hopeless lies about our real opponents, and slang each other at home.

We could just hire contractors to do the brutal stuff and provide us with the intel we need. Hell, we could probably hire Arab muslims to do the dirty work. We need to hunt down and capture (preferably) or kill the terrorist supporters who are using the websites and DEFINITELY need to go after the imams who encourage or defend terrorism. Oh yeah, if we hire merc contractors we need to implant chips in them or whatever it takes to keep them on a leash for life.

What I was getting at was in this vanity.

The US government should get over its love affair with using only "national technical means" and put feet on the ground.

And then rescind the Presidential restriction on targeted assassinations...going after a few of the head nutjobs in a public way would go a long way.

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