As systems disruption evolves as a method of open source warfare, we will increasingly see it coalesce into strategies for targeting megacities (more than half of humanity, as of this year, now live in urban environments). One conceptual pathway for this is the idea that a high "terrorism tax" on highly leveraged urban economic inputs/outputs can force these megacities into a series of economic failures. At a high level, the method works like this:
- Guerrillas attack networks that connect a city to the larger economy. They periodically shut down electricity systems, fuel, and transportation over a period of months (at sufficient levels and over a sufficient time to impact economic planning cycles). The attacks are simple and provide a extremely high returns on investment (ROIs of millions to one).
- This disruption causes the costs per economic transaction in the city to increase (as little as 10 percent may be needed). It also increases the risk and/or uncertainty that the transaction will never be completed at all. As a result of increases in cost and uncertainty, investment departs/delays and economic activity shifts to other locales. Joblessness rises. Incomes fall. The city descends to a lower level of economic equilibrium.
- Declines in economic activity, in combination with the disruption of essential services, delegitimizes the government and forces people to fall back on primary loyalties for support (a loyalty to a group that exceeds loyalty to the state/nation). Many of these groups become violent/criminal and eventually join the open source insurgency.
The Bandh
We can already find an evolving example of this in India. This is yet another example of how global interconnectivity enables innovations in guerrilla/terrorist method in one region (as in the siege of Baghdad) to quickly spread to others -- which one reason why I call this site "global guerrillas." According to Shlok Vadiya in the most recent issue of India's Pragati magazine, the...Naxals have taken the systems disruption strategy to its logical conclusion by utilizing economic shutdowns, called bandhs, to disrupt entire social systems. To illustrate, a blockade of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Bihar was declared in June of this year to protest the creation of Special Economic Zones for foreign investment.This method, in classic open source fashion, is being copied by other groups with the same intent:
Ad-hoc insurgencies such as the Gujjar campaign in early June adopted Naxalite strategy when they declared a Delhi bandh and followed up with an attempt to seal off the city, by cutting off 17 railway routes with only shovels and picks.