The Decentralizing World of the Global Guerrilla
Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization. John Robb. John Wiley & Sons. 208 pages; index; $24.95.
By Lt. Col. Mike Burke
U.S. Army retired
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced a number of books, most devoted to what has gone wrong in both theaters, with particular attention paid to the failure to plan for a lasting peace in Iraq. Few writers, however, have attempted to examine the future that these wars suggest, and fewer still have looked beyond the currently fashionable concern with global jihad.
In Brave New War, John Robb, a former Air Force intelligence officer and current adviser on the future of terrorism, infrastructure and markets, sets out what he sees as the current and future threats to globalized capitalism, in all its manifestations, from any number of disaffected groups. His major thesis is that our reliance on interconnected technology—communications, large industrial facilities, energy distribution—makes us in the developed world particularly vulnerable to what he calls “open-source warfare.” This form of combat entails large numbers of decentralized actors, connected by that same technology, acting in concert—but out of different self-interests—to destabilize and destroy that world.
Robb surveys the presurge conditions in Iraq, arguing that the United States is caught between sectarian guerrillas and local militias and thus has no good choices. Brave New War predates the troop increase that has brought some measure of stability to some areas, but I think Robb would see such gains as temporary because the underlying ethnic and tribal rivalries remain unsolved.
Robb also examines conflict in the usual places, ranging from Central America to Asia, with stops in the Middle East and Chechnya, and offers numerous examples of successful guerrilla actions against established governments. This leads him to make an interesting connection between the Thirty Years’ War (the last great European religious war) and our own times, arguing that we are perhaps seeing the “high watermark of the state,” now confronted by “global guerrillas” who essentially commodify and export conflict rather than fight for a cause.
These capabilities rely not only on access to the communications infrastructure of such powers but also on what Robb calls “long-tail” warfare. This term, popularized by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, refers to the ability of Internet retailers to stock many more products than a conventional store. They can thus satisfy tiny segments of the market at little or no additional overhead. Thus many different kinds of actors—guerrillas, paramilitaries, gangs, even private military companies—can pose many different threats in many different places at extremely low cost. In fact, such groups can offer niche warfare in the same way as, for example, Amazon.com can provide obscure books to a small number of customers.
Robb posits that the 9/11 attack on the United States represents the past, not the future, of global guerrillas. He sees it as a kind of failure on al Qaeda’s part, requiring the kind of long-term planning and commitment of resources that are simply unnecessary in a world where war can be waged so cheaply.
Robb’s response to this worldwide threat is an interesting one. Globalization has caused this current state of affairs, he says, and this open-source war may well mark its end. He argues for a radical restructuring of our own infrastructure, including greater redundancy and self-sufficiency. We must adapt to the decentralized world of the global guerrilla by becoming decentralized ourselves. He takes examples from the environmental movement, which, he says, has pointed the way to self-sufficiency for individuals, and so provides techniques we could adapt nationally.
This is all heady stuff, of course, and is certainly original and thought-provoking. It reflects very much the world from which Robb comes—the world of the security consultant, blogger and futurist. James Fallows, the protean writer for the Atlantic Monthly, provides the foreword to Brave New World, and New York Times columnist David Brooks has written glowingly of Robb as exactly the kind of thinker we need now. Robb’s adaptation of the language of contemporary popular thinkers also marks him as someone very much in tune with this kind of audience. If you regard, say, Thomas Friedman as a thoughtful public intellectual, you’ll like John Robb.
That said, predicting the future is always a rough business—remember futurist writers Alvin and Heidi Toffler? Michael Ignatieff’s Virtual War?—and Robb deserves a great deal of credit for trying to break us out of our current frames of reference. His fresh perspective on the present, however, is far more important than his predictions for the future. But Robb’s focus on techniques and capabilities outweighs his minimal discussion of politics, religion and culture, and he takes those historical lessons that suit his purposes, ignoring the rest. People fight wars for reasons—opposing a corrupt and unresponsive government, economic expansion, a desire to reestablish hegemony, among many others—not just to fight. Even gangs are primarily economic units. We have wars in the usual places because the power of the state there is weak, corrupt or nonexistent. Radically decentralizing our current infrastructure is frankly a pipe dream; making it robust, resilient and redundant, of course, is not. And no government or business is going to do so unless someone else pays for it or determines it to be a competitive advantage.
I often think that futurists like Robb are limited by their regarding the Internet (and Internet-like entities) as the future. They might find it more instructive to look at the international maritime industry, which relies increasingly on automation and lowest-common-denominator crews, minimally trained, on disposable ships owned by opaque operators. While this has massively lowered transportation costs, it has also contributed to environmental problems in terms of oil spills and toxic scrapyards, and safety and security problems for nations, cargo and crews. That industry is more likely what massive decentralization and fewer state actors look like.
But bloggers like Robb (who operates the well-regarded—in the blogosphere—GlobalGuerrillas web site) are captivated by their own ease in producing and publishing their ideas and tend to see the Internet’s utility in everything. In a way, his reliance on this technology has made him vulnerable to an external threat—not guerrillas, but old-line political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and the like who have devoted their lives to the study of the kinds of issues he discusses so glibly.
Still, Brave New War makes us see the world around us in new and interesting ways, and if Robb stimulates better thinking, he deserves much praise.
LT. COL. MIKE BURKE, USA Ret., taught English at the U.S. Military Academy for eight years. He served with the 1st Armored Division during the Persian Gulf War.
A History of U.S. Army Thought
The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War. Brian McAllister Linn. Harvard University Press. 312 pages; index; $27.95.
By James Jay Carafano
Few books could be more timely than Brian Linn’s The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War. Linn, a professor of history at Texas A&M University, has written a serious and comprehensive intellectual history of the U.S. Army. He traces Army thought from the American Revolution to the war on terrorism. It is hard to imagine a scholar more suited to take on the task.
Linn starts by defining what he considers the three intellectual schools that habitually debate the meaning, purpose and result of employing landpower. He sees these as three distinct “martial philosophies.”
The first is espoused by the “Guardians,” who dominated discourse on military affairs in the 19th century. They envisioned warfare as more a science than an art and constantly proposed systematic solutions to national security challenges.
In contrast, “Heroes” focused on the human element of military affairs, emphasizing the intangible factors that influence war like morale, discipline and leadership. Rather than imposing solutions, Heroes saw war as a competition between two thinking, determined foes.
Linn’s third category—the “Managers”—is an intellectual school that came of age over the course of the 20th century. Managers focus on the challenge of mobilizing national power for major wars.
Linn argues that the three groups (Guardians, Heroes and Managers) faced off regarding the mind and soul of the military; their clashes produced the policies, programs, doctrine and force structure that shaped the Army over the course of American history. This is a history, Linn argues, of “what military intellectuals believed they had learned … after the shooting stopped.” These were the echoes of battle that shaped the Army’s various visions of the future.
If nothing else, Linn’s proposed categorization of intellectual ideas ought to generate lively debate in staff and war college papers for the next quarter-century.
While much of this history has been studied before, the chapters on the post-Cold War cover fairly new territory for historians. They should attract the particular interest of both scholars and practicing warriors. Linn’s overview of the Army’s efforts to deal with the new world disorder is unparalleled. These chapters alone justify a read.
The Echo of Battle does such an excellent job of surveying what the Army thought over the history of the republic that the book ought to prompt more research on the intellectual component of service life. One study clearly called for is an examination of how the Army gained knowledge. Knowing what Army intellectuals thought is only part of the story; tracing the ontology of these ideas is vital as well. Armies need to know where their ideas come from. Part of a complete intellectual history is knowing how thinkers think.
In crafting new visions of the future, it is also important that the Army think about where to look for ideas. Perhaps The Echo of Battle will stimulate Army intellectuals to strive to do better in the future.
It remains to be seen if Linn’s divisions will stand up under scrutiny and if they serve to stimulate creative thinking about how to ponder the military of the future. It is certainly a subject worth a good deal more thought.
JAMES JAY CARAFANO is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the author of G.I. Ingenuity: Improvisation, Technology, and Winning World War II.