JOURNAL: Systems Disruption in Jordan

As anticipated on this weblog, the fall-out of the "big bang" in Iraq, has accelerated system disruption's displacement of symbolic terrorism. In fact, what's left of symbolic terrorism is now typically restricted to attacks that can cause immediate systemic social failure (as we are seeing in Iraq right now). The combination of the Abqaiq attack and this new attempted attack on a major power station in Jordan shows that al Qaeda has adopted infrastructure disruption as its preferred method of warfare (good thing my book is in editing right now). Reuters:

A group of al Qaeda militants arrested by Jordanian authorities had planned to blow up a major power plant that feeds the whole country, security sources said on Thursday. Jordan announced on Wednesday it had foiled an al Qaeda "terrorist plot" and arrested two Iraqis and a Libyan who were plotting to carry out a suicide attack against a vital civilian installation. Officials said the arrests took place last week.

I anticipate that al Qaeda will continue to refine their method by decreasing the scale of their attacks (which would reduce planning time, resource requirements, and chance of discovery). Large suicide attacks on relatively hard targets offer low rates of return once the potential of success has been factored in. Similar levels of performance can be achieved, as demonstrated in Iraq and Balochistan, through better systems analysis.

This attempt also confirms that systems disruption will be the method used within the US during the next attack.

Comments

[Eric Stepp]

John,

I'd like to say thank you for your excellent posts in the past about systems disruption. They've greatly helped me in my own analysis and view of the world.

Using some of the same points you made in this post, I had written something yesterday on the Jordanian attack at http://www.beathotel.com/projectlucidity-joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=42&Itemid=2

Thanks, again.

[TM Lutas]

The engineers have been looking at systems evolution for a long time and the consensus seems to be that you start out in the first generation of systems being not very useful but useful enough to grow, robust enough for the value provided. As the network effect kicks in, you get complex systems that provide a lot of value and who tend to be proportionately more fragile, that is the redundancies and security of the system grows but not as much as the usefulness. This is the stage that many systems are at right now. The third stage decentralizes infrastructure, creates many more redundancies, and generally makes your high value systems nearly impossible to take down. You get to third stage systems by having outages impress upon the funders that reliability counts.

We were starting to move into third stage systems on infrastructure even before global guerillas came into our consciousness on 9/11 because hackers provided the same sort of infrastructure irritants (though at a massively lower level and with different aims), sort of like a live virus immunization. That being said, there's an awful lot of stuff that is at the 2nd stage.

The point I'm trying to make is that we shouldn't panic. The problem is old, the solution is generally known, and it's the price tag that's held back the move more than anything else.

I would expect that we're going to get a great accelerant to a major long-term trend on public utilities and other infrastructure but that the effect will be less disruptive than you might think.

[John Robb]

Actually, the problem isn't that old. Network analysis of complex systems is relatively recent (scale free, HOT, SOC, small world, SNA, DNA, etc.). Additionally, the solutions are neither that easy nor well defined. Finally, there are serious social implications for restruction to enable the level of robustness necessary to mitigate attacks like this, not just money.

[Valdis]

John commented... "Additionally, the solutions are neither that easy nor well defined. Finally, there are serious social implications for restruction to enable the level of robustness necessary to mitigate attacks like this, not just money."

Yup. Pipelines and grids are not easily made into resilient systems... they are toast to intelligent attacks. They are efficient AND fragile. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the hub-and-spoke world?

[Cardenio]

Yay book !

I can't think of any kind of systems disruption that the mooks could pull off inside the US ( or Canada or much of EU or UK anymore ) I mean what are they going to do, steal everyone's mail ? Also, they'd have to do it over and over, the power has to be off for a week, and then again , and again, they can't do that.

They also have to ' top 9-11 ' and that's a hard act to follow ! I'm afraid to say it but, I think the only card they've got left is to try and use an atomic if they've got one. ' Biological ' isn't really going to work and importantly too, doesn't look great on TV. What'll precipitate that ? I think it could be if it looks like we're NOT going to attack Iran.

[Mark]

John wrote:

"Actually, the problem isn't that old."

System problems are very old and all have biological parallels. The way our systems manifest themselves may be new, but the 'problem class' is old.

Valdis wrote:

"Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the hub-and-spoke world?"

One could claim the 'hub-and-spoke' world has been degenerating since the fall of Rome, or the Chinese middle kingdom.

[Valdis]

Look around Mark, much of the world's infrastructure [oil/gas/electric/water/sewer/airlines] is built on the hub-and-spoke model. Maybe the engineers never took History??? ;-)

Actually, they focused on efficiency and cost, and day-to-day use[right thing to do in their context]. Unfortunately, the efficient systems are very fragile [to intelligent attack, not random failure] and therefore the focus of GGs.

Over the long term we need to re-design our infrastructure so that it is both efficient AND resilient.

[Kim McDodge]

Valdis, could you give us a couple of images to take us beyond hub and spoke? Mark has a point in biological resonance. My favorite is fungal hyphae.

[joe]

Valdis, bio (anthrax) used in autumn '01 was aimed at the delivery system and the American publics' psyche. econ and psyche impact of anthrax huge. Joe L

PS public figures don't open their own mail.

[Valdis]

For spread of contagion/bio stuff see:
http://www.orgnet.com/contagion.html
That network looks like a hub-and-spoke because no network data was collected from the NON-contagious individuals -- those nodes in the "cul de sac" would normally be connected to other nearby nodes and therefore not be singly connected spokes.

For hard infrastructure, an easy intro is here:
http://www.orgnet.com/SocialLifeOfRouters.pdf
That article was writen prior to 9/11, when I was in an "efficiency" mind-set. But you can see the resilience implications in the what-ifs and centralization discussion.

Enjoy!

[Marcello]

"The third stage decentralizes infrastructure, creates many more redundancies, and generally makes your high value systems nearly impossible to take down."

Redundancy in systems like power generation means having large amounts of very expensive equipment (transformers, power lines, additional generation capacity etc)essentially sitting there doing nothing most of the time.That is very bad from a financial point of view.
Decentralization, with most power generation technologies, is inherently inefficient.For reasons that should be obvious a single 1000 MW power plant is cheaper to build and to run than ten 100MW ones.Again that is bad from a financial point of view.
For these reasons such measures will not be taken until systemic sabotage becomes the norm.By then it might be too late to implement them.

[Valdis]

Marcello wrote: "For reasons that should be obvious a single 1000 MW power plant is cheaper to build and to run than ten 100MW ones."

True. But you are still building hubs... just smaller ones... which does not fix the problem... think distributed with NO obvious point of failure. As long as you have hubs you have targets.