Global Guerrillas

RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Technological Acceleration

The pace of technological change is accelerating exponentially. Fact, not much real debate on that. Most important to our analysis is how this change superempowers small groups, allowing them to accomplish activities normally reserved for large corporations or governments. The keys to this supermepowerment are:

• Better tools. Moore's law, Carlson curves, and personal fabrication (DIY everything, the start of an exponential rate of improvement for matter/products). Shift from centralized production to 'grow' your own computer/chemicals etc. Local energy.
  
• Rapidly expanding network resources. How to's on everything. Basic education via open courseware (from the best Universities in the world). Sensor networks. Spimes.
  
• New social connectivity. Expert networks. Tinkering via open source development. Telecommuting. Wisdom of crowds and crowd-sourcing.
  

Unfortunately, this supempowerment makes it possible for small groups to do incredible damage to global society. Fortunately, it also making it possible for resilient communities to efficiently and productively emulate global production/services locally. As a result, the resilient community isn't a step backwards to 19th Century approaches (survivalism, scarcity, and low productivity), but rather a move in a direction that makes it possible to generate rapid and sustained (as opposed to the relative stasis and irregular progress of the current system) improvements how we live.

JOURNAL: Iran, Israel and Missiles

"Hopefully, this event (the Iranian test firing of intermediate rang missiles), it will serve as a catalyst that will finally gel all of the different factors that have been out there that will allow us then to act with our friends and allies in a most effective fashion and modify Iranian behavior, but we cannot allow a second Holocaust." John McCain (July 9th, 2008)

The wild card in any potential conflict between the West and Iran has always been Israel. It alone considers Iran + nuclear weapons an existential threat (the lack of identifiable existential threats to the West is the primary reason conventional warfare in an age of global interconnectivity will become very rare). As a result, Israel has been engaged in a fierce internal debate over whether to accept Iranian nuclear development (which, according to Israeli estimates reaches a tipping point in the spring of 2009) or delay the program through an attack. Iran nearly decided that debate with this week's very provocative and well timed missile tests (particularly of Shahab-3, a missile with a range of 1,250 miles). Missile launches are the ultimate in provocation given that Israeli civilians, less than two years ago, suffered a month long barrage of Iranian missiles -- if this had occurred against US civilians, we would have already attacked/invaded. This, in combination with uncertainty of the upcoming US elections (see McCain's 'greenlight' above), makes an attack by Israel on Iran almost certain.

NOTE: Thomas Barnett is thinking along similar lines with "All systems go for war."

RC JOURNAL: Survivalism?

Here's an aggressive version of the Resilient Community. May change it later to make it clearer. Suggestions are always welcome.
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There's a misconception within some quarters that solutions to growing global instability/failure that don't involve fixing the current system is an admission of failure. Further, this line of reasoning charges that efforts at adding resilience to local communities is nothing more than survivalism. This isn't true. Here's why:

• Local is the only choice. The ability of the global system to dampen instability and prevent failure is nearing zero. We have neither the organizational frameworks necessary for global governance nor the precise tools of global policy required (even IF we were smart enough to manage something this complex). Any chance of real global change must start at the ground level by correcting the true sources of the problem and spread virally. Resilient communities eliminate nearly all of the drivers towards global instability and mitigate the effects of instability already in the system. It's self-reinforcing.

• RCs guard against systemic decay and catastrophic failure. Survivalism assumes isolation, hoarding, and subsistence means to preserve only the bare essentials of life (the Jeremiah Johnson scenario). It's an approach that guarantees only long term privation and nearly inevitable failure. In contrast, resilient communities replace increasingly unreliable and expensive global sourcing of energy, food, etc. with locally efficient (and offer higher quality) alternatives. It also provides the ultimate level of protection against superempowered threats and hollow states. As a result, it preserves an existing quality of life (or lays the foundations for the creation of one where it didn't exist before).

• RCs offer a path to accelerating returns. In contrast to the isolation of survivalism, the RC is community driven -- both within the community's physical environs and across similar efforts (via data connectivity). As such, it will benefit (we are already seeing this) from rapid rates of innovation available through open source development -- across the entire range of activities from energy to food to product fabrication. Relatively quickly, the solutions generated from these efforts will convert a community that was once a black hole of economic productivity into its exact opposite: a fount of accelerating wealth and life improvement that is orders of magnitude more efficient in its use of mass, energy, space, time, and information.

IRAN AND ASYMMETRIC WARFARE

There is still a significant possibility of a US/Israeli air attack on Iran during the closing months of this year. A multitude of triggers could set it off. Here's some thinking you might find useful if it does occur.
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Any attack by the US/Israel on Iran will be ostensibly aimed at suppressing the Iranian nuclear program. However, it will quickly evolve into something much larger, an airpower-based EBO (effects based operation). The objective of this EBO will regime change (see the brief: "Collapsing Iran", April 2006, for more details on this) without a ground invasion. It is assumed that by completely disrupting (turning off) the entire country's critical infrastructures (from power to communications to transportation) and isolating the country's leadership (in their bunkers), the country will quickly fragment in hundreds of competing factions.

NOTE: There is a line of reasoning (in various military circles) that the only success the US has had militarily over the last two decades has been from the application of air power. From the two Gulf Wars to Afghanistan, airpower was successful. Ground forces were successful to the extent they mopped up afterwards and quickly withdrew. In contrast, it was only when the Army/Marines attempted to hold ground that the US military ran into trouble. These advocates maintain that the US military should never hold ground in the future and that all applications of conventional military force in the future should primarily be airpower. This line of reasoning is currently being used by advocates of an attack on Iran.

War as a Conflict of Minds
Of course, the Iranian military leadership has anticipated this and believe any future attack against them will be based on airpower/EBO focused on regime change and not a ground invasion. Airpower, to the Iranians, is a form of asymmetric attack since they can't compete in this arena. As a result, the Iranians have developed what they call a "Passive Defense" run by its paramilitary (the Basij), based on the lessons learned by Hezbollah during the 2006 war with Israel. Mansharof and Savyon have explored the tenets of Passive Defense with an excellent article now available on MEMRI. Their planning consists of:

• Concealment of critical facilities and nodes. Likely also parallel communications infrastructure that allows central leadership to communication with local paramilitary forces. Paramilitary elements will be recruited and installed in all critical facilities/infrastructure to help with recovery. Widespread public participation.
  
• Emergency services at the local level that will provide food, water, and other services when they are cut off during the EBO. The Basij is being trained to provide this.
  
• Increased connectivity of infrastructure to neighboring countries to make it more politically sensitive for the US to attack (in short, this connectivity is why conventional warfare is becoming increasingly rare, and why there is so much resistance to an attack on Iran in most quarters).

Selected quotes from Gen. Jalali, head of Basij:

"With military bases and forces around [Iran], America has access to the entire territory of the country. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a political regime that relies upon the [Iranian] people... If the enemy aims to change the regime, it can achieve this by disrupting the [regime's ability] to administer the population. To this end, the enemy will attempt to paralyze infrastructures and the vital institutions of the regime, in order to sow dissatisfaction among the people."

"That is, the enemy will try to destroy the infrastructures [vital to] people's lives, and we must protect the people while providing necessary services. According to some analyses, the [2006] Lebanon war was 'a war of bridges,' because Israel destroyed all bridges in Lebanon, large and small, in order to cut off all land routes. In other words, in that war, the immediate aim was to [destroy] the infrastructures [that permit] administering the population, but the ultimate aim was to render such administration impossible."

Offensive Operations
In addition to Passive Defense, the Iranians are also likely planning asymmetric offensive operations aimed at shortening the engagement -- a form of strategic barrage designed to limit the duration of the EBO. For example, Hezbollah's rocket attacks on Israel during the 2006 war were able to inflict strategic economic/political costs on Israel. These costs ensured that the war was short. In Iran's case, this means a series of attacks (a combination of guerrilla, missile, and small boat attacks) on oil facilities and oil transportation routes with the intent of making the costs to the global economy so great that political pressure will quickly force an end to the engagement.

RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Extreme Urban

"Every building is an entity, is a state, which is autonomous, let's say, from government, because you have to cater for your electricity, for your water, for your everything. So you get together and say we are going to get together to pay $2,000, $5,000 to do this and that because we want to live."

John, a contractor in Beruit, Lebanon to Marketplace Radio, "Not your Average Home Improvements"

JOURNAL: Governance of the Wilderness

During the recent mass arrests of "insurgents" in Saudi Arabia, a new book by Sheik Abu-Bakar al Naji (al Qaeda's lead warfare theorist), Governance of the Wilderness (Edarat al-Wahsh), was found in safe houses. It appears, both to me and the many readers that sent me news of this, that al Qaeda's theory is edging ever closer to Global Guerrilla thinking (the optimal approach for small group warfare/global insurgency). Amir Taheri has an excellent review of the book at the Post. Salient points include:

• System disruption. "countless small operations" that "target oilfields, sea and airports, tourist facilities and especially banking and financial services" to weaken the state and create a "wilderness."
  
• Temporary autonomous zones and primary loyalties "Islamists in the 'wilderness' must create parallel societies alongside existing ones."
  
• Avoid control of a state don't "set up formal governments, which would be subject to economic pressure or military attack."
  

RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Smart Local Networks

One of richest pathways towards improving the level of community coordination in the event of disaster/disconnection, is through the use of community Web sites that provide actionable information (here's an example of how this worked in San Diego during the recent fires) and reverse 911 data-sharing. Unfortunately, community emergency Web sites as well as basic data services are extremely vulnerable to disconnection. What's needed are smart local networks.

Smart Local Networks
(a local Internet or community Intranet)
Most of the local loops (from telco fiber to cable company coaxial) currently in place and/or being installed in the US are dumb (I suspect it is the same globally). They simply route data from local customers to regionally clustered corporate server farms and then outwards/back. This means that any disconnection (physical or logical fault) between local customers and these remote systems will result in a complete cessation of service. To correct this deficiency, communities need to start to think more like a corporation: security of data services are considered central to a company's survival. So, as part of future negotiations with cable/telcos, communities should request that companies allow them to piggyback on their "dumb" networks to create a smart local loops. This would entail:

• A high availability local network for emergencies. A local emergency network that connects all homes and business in the area by accessing the local aggregation nodes of cable/telco operators (which is actually a relatively trivial/inexpensive network exercise). It should become the default network if access to the greater Internet fails. Optimally, the network should sit astride both cable and telco services to provide a seamless community "footprint."
  
• High availability servers (computers that host Web sites) in the local loop. Servers that are on the community network and located within the communities environs. Back-up power should be provided to ensure that these servers maintain high up time.
  
• (futures) Community coordination software to sit on these servers. Easy to use and edit social software: blogs, wikis, etc. If the market is large enough, there will be software packages (hopefully open source) that replicate the functionality of a fully functional emergency response system (i.e. locally cached Google maps, etc.). In terms of operating this software, most communities could ask schools/boy scouts/etc. to maintain the software, even during an emergency (young people are much more likely to have the skill sets to do this w/o specific training).