Open Source Warfare

Globalisation was getting kind of tiresome anyway, wasn't it? Anyway it might all come to a crashing end and while serious, smart people are thinking about these issues, New York City politicians, too bent on greed and short term profit do not:

City Journal Open Source Warfare John Robb’s chilling brief on postmodern terrorism Glenn Reynolds 23 May 2007

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, by John Robb (Wiley, 224 pp., $24.95)

Last year, I wrote a book called An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Government, Big Media, and Other Goliaths. It was a celebration of how technology empowers the little guy, though I did spend some time discussing the darker sides of this development. John Robb’s Brave New War is in a way the mirror image of my argument: it devotes a lot of space to the dark side of the technological empowerment of individuals and small groups, and much less to potential upsides.

The dark side is certainly there. In the old days, you needed many people to commit significant mayhem—something like a Roman legion, or at least a century. Nowadays, one man with an AK-47 is probably a match for a hundred Roman legionaries, and modern explosives make matters even more asymmetrical. In the foreseeable future, Robb concludes, we may even see a situation where an individual can declare war on the world—and win.

.....

All sorts of technological trends—from biotechnology to nanotechnology—work to amplify the lethality of individuals and small groups. But the biggest contemporary source of bad-guy empowerment, Robb rightly notes, comes from the vulnerability of our own modern systems and networks for electrical distribution, telecommunications, transportation, food distribution, and more, which are subject to swift disruption if critical nodes or resources are destroyed.

.....

Even without terrorists or war, things can easily go wrong in our interconnected world, as became exceedingly clear in 2003. The SARS epidemic sent shockwaves throughout the global economy, and threatened to ground air travel.

......

That puts a premium on planning, to respond effectively when things go wrong.[reminder there is NO security plan and NO security measures for the proposed Altantic Yards site] And that’s a place where there’s much room for improvement—both in our world and, to a degree, in Robb’s book. When it comes to survivability, Robb is a small-is-beautiful kind of guy.

.......

Robb is a critic of “brittle security”—the approach that produces a hard shell but a soft center. He’s right to be critical. As Robb makes clear, terrorism is a fast-moving, dispersed phenomenon that depends on the varying talents of lots of enthusiastic participants. ......

......

Nevertheless, Robb has written an important book that every policymaker should read. While brief, it is also—quite justifiably—frightening. My worry is that the paucity of constructive suggestions will cause many rightly frightened policymakers to put down Brave New War, order a stiff drink, and think about something more pleasant, surely not the result that Robb intends.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee, and the publisher of InstaPundit.com.