Global Guerrillas

THE RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Malcom's Platform

Resilient communities aren't built through one-off projects/efforts, good will, and lifestyle changes. Instead, they are a vibrant ecosystems of activity, that are innovative, robust, and efficient. The key to growing ecosystems that exhibit these qualities is to build platforms that span everything from electricity to food to security. Here's a short story about Malcom McLean to get your head around the idea of what a platform is (this is for my upcoming book on Resilient Communities) and why they are so powerful:
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Malcom's Platform

In 1937, during a commercial delivery trip carrying North Carolina cotton bales to the port in Hoboken, New Jersey, Malcom McLean became frustrated at the wait he experienced to unload his cargo at the port facility. He later remarked, “I had to wait most of the day to deliver the bales, sitting there in my truck, watching stevedores load other cargo. It struck me that I was looking at a lot of wasted time and money. I watched them take each crate off the truck and slip it into a sling, which would then lift the crate into the hold of the ship.” This thought was carried forward seventeen years, when at the helm of a company with 1,776 trucks and 37 transport terminals (on the Eastern Seaboard) he gravitated to the idea that long haul routes would be better accomplished through sea transport.

However, to accomplish this, he needed to remake the shipping industry from the ground up. In other words, he needed to build a shipping platform for the shipping industry. What is a platform? At a high level, a platform takes related activities that are complex, unique, and variable and turns them into activities that are simple, universal, and standard. Here's how Malcom built his (and now our) shipping platform:

• First, he created a shipping container that could be detached from a truck and stacked on a ship without unbundling the contents.
  
• He followed this with new wheel systems to quickly attach containers to trucks.
  
• Finally, he developed container ships that allowed easy roll-on/roll-off and container stacking.

The new containerized system he developed simplified shipping by pushing the complexity of packing and unpacking cargo to the edges of the shipping network. Second, it made interconnection with the network easy, since containers were inexpensive and of a standard set of sizes. Finally, it lowered/standardized costs, reduced theft, and limited damage.

The debut of his new system was with the maiden voyage of the Ideal X, a converted oil tanker that loaded fifty-eight containers at Port Hoboken, New Jersey and unloaded them in Houston, Texas to his waiting trucks for delivery. The success of this innovation led him to radically expand his business into a powerhouse called SeaLand Industries that had twenty seven thousand containers and thirty-seven container ships by the end of the 1960s.

Obviously, it didn’t end there. The advantages in speed, cost, and flexibility were so compelling that the entire shipping industry was transformed as companies, ports, and governments adopted his containerization process. By 2000, nearly 90% of the world’s shipping was accomplished using containers in support of a vast global ecosystem of manufacturers and retailers made possible by Malcom's shipping platform.
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Still working on this post. Feedback welcome. JR

OPEN SOURCE WARFARE: Cyberwar

In less than an hour, I had become an Internet soldier. I didn't receive any calls from Kremlin operatives; nor did I have to buy a Web server or modify my computer in any significant way.
Evgeny Morozov, Slate, An Army of Ones and Zeroes
How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia Cyberwar.

Cyberwarfare is a form of open source warfare (see Brave New War for a deep exploration of open source warfare) over the Internet fought by groups civilians for reasons of nationalism, revenge, and (worst of all) fun. It's messy, chaotic, and nearly impossible to control. The benefits of an open source cyberwar include:

• Deniability. Offensive operations by government computers/personnel against a target nation is an act of war. Actions by civilian vigilantes is not and can be disowned. An inability to point to a an offending organization can make blame difficult to affix: note the speed at which the US tech press was willing to deny a Russian cyberwar against Estonia.
  
• A huge talent pool. Rather than spend money on training a limited number of uniformed personnel (likely poorly), it's possible to draw on a talent pool of hundreds of thousands of participants (from hackers to IT professionals to cybercriminals). Given the rapid decay/turnover in skills, high rates of innovation, high compensation, and the value of real-world expertise, the best people for cyberwarfare don't work (nor will they ever) in the government. The best you can do is rent/entice them for a while.
  
• Access to the best Resources/Weaponry. The best tools for cyberwarfare are developed in the cybercriminal community. They have vast and rapidly growing capabilities: a plethora of botnets, worms, compromised computers within target networks, identity information, etc. Further, these capabilities are cheap to rent.

The Problem
Unfortunately, in the US, there is nothing but confusion over cyberwarfare. The news that the Pentagon will not create a new USAF new Cyber Command added to a recent failed attempt by the US military to define what 'cyber deterrence' means and it becomes evident that the entire concept of 'cyberwar' is yielding little but confusion. Unfortunately, it appears little relief is in sight.

In contrast to failed US efforts, both China and Russia have adopted the OSW approach to cyberwarfare. How did they do it? Simply:

• Engage, co-opt, and protect cybercriminals. Essentially, use this influence to deter domestic commercial attacks and encourage an external focus. This keeps the skills sharp and the powder dry.
  
• Seed the movement. Once the decision to launch a cyberattack is made, start it off right. Purchase botnets covertly from criminal networks to launch attacks, feed 'patriotic' blogs to incite attacks and list targets, etc.
  
• Get out of the way. Don't interfere. Don't prosecute participants. Take notes.

JOURNAL: BTC Pipeline not at Risk

It's already shut down for the rest of the week (two weeks total) due to an attack on it by the PKK. Sounds familiar. Turkey is losing $300k a day during the shutdown (total partner losses are easily an order of magnitude more). ;->

This war will certainly roil the investment climate for strategic systems like the Nabucco pipeline. It may be, given the impotence of the West in responding to Russian activities and the extreme value of energy flows outside of Russian control, to help Georgia learn how to deter attack through selective systems disruption.

RUSSIA'S HOSTILE ACQUISITION

Russia is, for all intents and purposes, a corporation with the trappings of a nation-state. The core business of the Russian corporation is energy, its production and transport (as a result, Gazprom, Russia's key subsidiary, will likely become the world's most valuable publicly traded corporation, valued at over $1 trillion). Internally, production consolidation has led to the destruction of corporate competitors, to include domestic corporations (Yukos) and foreign partners (most recently BP). Externally, the focus has been on consolidating control over energy transportation (pipelines) and downstream integration (Europe, via soft pressure). Recent actions to control energy transportation include:

• Estonia. Estonia had a lucrative business shipping Russian energy resources via its ports (i.e. Muuga). To protect this business, Estonia tried to block the construction of a Baltic pipeline that would have allowed Russia to send resources directly to Europe. The result was a Russian economic blockade of the country and a cyberattack by "patriotic" Russian hackers on Estonian computer systems.
  
• Ukraine. To protect its low cost purchases of Russian energy, Ukraine began to exert control over Russian pipeline traversing its territory. Russia cut off supplies.
  
• Georgia. The construction of the BTC pipeline (1 million barrels a day, currently Azeri and potentially Kazakh oil) that bypassed Russian control led to intentional systems disruption that led to a weeklong energy blackout, support for domestic insurgents, and (most recently) a military invasion.
  

The Poison Pill
Georgia's mistake, and it is a common one, is that it thought that connectivity to the global system (as well as the US) was a viable defense against a hostile Russian takeover. As a result, it became a vital cog in the BTC and a willing participant in the US adventure in Iraq. That defense proved mostly hollow. In short, the only real defense against hostile takeovers by aggressive corporate states is to make the cost of the acquisition too expensive for the acquirer. The way to do this is through the development of a poison pill: the intentional disruption of Russian energy pipelines (see, "The Example of Georgia" January 2006 and "JOURNAL: Can Georgia become a micropower?" October 2006 for more on this). Global guerrilla methods, particularly cyber/physical disruption, compliment interconnection as part of a Micropower defense strategy.