
Here's Fred's argument in a nutshell. The global order we enjoy today is unravelling. The reason is simple. Technological change is moving forward faster than social/political change. Eventually, ubiquitous access to rapidly advancing technology will make it possible for small groups to confront status quo political and social structures with weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, biological, and other unknown new technologies. Since our antiquated nation-states are not constructed to withstand these challenges the results will be devastating: some states will completely collapse, others will turn into police states, and some will be taken over by coups (he lays out a scenario for how these weapons can be used to take control of a state). In short, most of the damage that will be done won't be from the attacks themselves, but from the societal response to the attacks (hence the name: Annihilation from Within). He completes the book by providing us with some ideas on how to mitigate the societal damage -- continuity of leadership, detection, unity, and territorial sovereignty.
In all, Fred Ikle does a great job at encapsulating a key aspect of global guerrillas. Unfortunately, he intentionally disregards the changes in warfare, copiously documented on this site, that will make the threat constant/ongoing/improving, rather than merely a set of random outliers. As a result of this deficit, Fred proposes, as improvements to our status quo political structures, only minor tweaks and amorphous goals (like unity). If he had fully embraced these changes in warfare, he would have seen that the nation-state isn't a structure that will provide the resilience we need to survive these challenges -- particularly since the complexity of its solutions are now generating negative returns on investment (they are not only ineffective, they can often cause more harm than good). What is needed are new simple platforms (my modification of Joseph Tainter's Byzantine strategy), that will continuously produce efficient, flexible, and non-zero sum resiliency from the bottom up. How to build these platforms is THE challenge of this century.
If you keep gazing into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.Friedrich Nietzche