Guerrillas of the world: Unite!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.
Why?
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.
Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.
Early column sighting: Press of Atlantic City
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Comments (2)
I was happy with how this turned out.
I like book reviews to be generally positive on what I like about the book, rather than pointing out shortcomings (you know, add to the pile).
Posted by Tom Barnett | May 27, 2007 11:43 AM
Good review, in both senses.
I have to say, I was more convinced after reading the book that we do have serious vulnerabilities right here at home -- more than I was just reading the blog. In particular, the power grid is built for efficiency not security. Nonetheless, the experience of Nazi Germany under the sledgehammer pounding of the round-the-clock bomber offensive is an important data point. Even a society organized by telephone, telegraph and paper files and letters was able to reroute itself and do workarounds and keep functioning. Unless the terrorists add nuclear weapons or pandemic-scale plagues to their suite of capabilities, I don't think they can "hollow out" the economy of the USA or the other Anglosphere countries (Aus/NZ/CA/UK) or Western and Central Europe. The Mumbai train attack was, for example, on the scale of a single B-29 bombload, and the trains were running again in a matter of hours.
All that said, the time is now for more effort and thought and investment to be devoted to system resilience, networking, flattening hierarchy and generally preparing the Core for the wave of attacks John Robb (I think correctly) foresees.
We will beat the bad guys. But the system we have now cannot do it. We need to start figuring out what a networked, resilient, responsive security and retaliation force looks like to take out the global guerillas. Probably something like SOCOM combined with Interpol on the offensive side, and like a big insurance company requiring best practices on the other side. All very vague. Better minds than mine will tackle this problem.
Posted by Lexington Green | May 27, 2007 1:33 PM