Global Guerrillas

PANDORA'S BOX

As state vs. state conflict increasingly becomes an historical outlier (which should still be guarded against, but done so with a cold eye to the costs), it is being replaced by a form of sub-state warfare that is much more confusing and complex. Despite this complexity, there are those that would wrongly boil down the emerging conflict into good vs. evil narratives. Here's an intellectual antidote.

The Keys to Pandora's Box

The onrush of globalization and a weakening of the nation-state (across a wide variety of measures) has unlocked Pandora's box. A plethora of violent groups, derived from an equally diverse set of primary loyalties (the sources of group loyalty that are more powerful than loyalties to the state), have emerged. Many of these groups utilize old pre-Westphalian motivations for warfare, although some motivations are being shoehorned into new synthetic models. Regardless, these motivations derive from the following:

• Guerrilla Economics. Everyone is now in competition with everyone else, without regard to the borders of the melted global map. Further, most nation-states have found themselves unable to mitigate the effects of rapid cycles of global economic destruction/creation. As a result, an increasing number of people have turned to primary loyalties for succor. Many of these groups have opted for "black globalization" (the $3 trillion dollar transnational criminal economy) as a means of advancement. This path has put these groups on a collision course with nation-states. We've seen this from Nigeria to Brazil.
  
  
• Toxic ideas. When western European colonists arrived on the shores of previously isolated locations, they often carried many afflictions to which they had immunity (a product of a large and diverse population). The result was devastating to local populations since they didn't share this immunity. A reprise of this process is underway within the world of ideas. Ideas (or Richard Dawkins' memes) for which we have a certain degree of immunity to -- from alcohol to pornography to divorce to gambling to irreverence... -- in the developed world can be toxic to those populations that are now exposed by globalization. The result is a violent reaction as people turn to primary loyalties for protection. For an excellent primer on this, please watch a short video by the philosopher Dan Dennett (at TED). We've seen this from Thailand to Algeria.
  
  
• Disruptions. The motivations of the previous two categories can be accelerated by shocks to the global system. These shocks include the unintentionally self-inflicted like regime change/nation-building or intentional like terrorism that targets systems. Others include those that we don't control: from economic dislocations caused by malfunctions/non-linearity in the global marketplace (energy shocks to financial panics) to pandemics to natural disasters. The list goes on. In each of these situations, the shock causes a return to primary loyalties for safety (we will see much more of this as uncontrolled global systems go non-linear, exacerbated by our unwillingness to adopt dampening strategies such as resilient communities).

JOURNAL: South Africa's Electricity Shortage

“Because of this situation, economic growth just stops. In that way, the problem solves itself.” Andrew Kenny, an engineering consultant to the NYTimes.

"If you want to see the future - just take a look at what is happening in South Africa at the moment." Paul, a SA resident, in a letter to me last weekend.

Chronic electricity shortages in South Africa provide an excellent example for why a resilient community approach to development is necessary.

Rolling blackouts ("load shedding") have made life a miserable hell for individuals and businesses alike. Under-investment, bad management, poor planning, difficult weather, and shoddy maintenance have combined to create a power crisis that will take at least four years to return to stability (which will damage economic growth, foreign direct investment, and social stability). It has also become a regional crisis, since power exports have been halted to regional trading partners. According to an e-mail from Paul in South Africa, co-dependent networks are starting to breakdown and there has been a run on alternatives sources of energy:

...the rest of the infrastructure is now showing cracks. One of the provinces told the government that they would have to initiate severe water restrictions if the situation does not improve because all the reservoirs are filled with electric pumps. And there has been a massive run on generators and UPS systems by both private individuals and businesses. Thanks to that the demand for fuel has shot through the roof. Same with LPG and natural gas products.

This may result in domestic energy hoarding/competition though selective disruption of connectivity (in a very similar fashion to what we saw in Iraq).

THE RESILIENT COMMUNITY

It should be clear, as we watch the gyrations and excesses of global markets, that no organization/state/group has any meaningful control over its direction. The same is true for almost every other aspect of globalization, from the environment to transnational crime to energy flows. In short, we've lost control and our collective future is in the hands of a morally neutral system that is operating in ways that we don't fully understand (nor will we). The best defense against this emerging situation is not to call for new Manhattan projects or global treaties or Marshall plans, which won't work since we can neither marshal the resources necessary nor collectively agree on anything other than the most basic rules of connectivity, it is to slowly introduce organic stability into out global system. The concept I've latched onto as a solution is what I call the resilient community.

This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. These services are configured to provide the ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid in the following areas (an incomplete list):

• Energy.
• Food.
• Security (both active and passive).
• Communications.
• Transportation.

The resilient community has broad applicability beyond just improving the ability of those of us in developed economies to preserve wealth and a quality of life despite severe system shocks. It can also be applied to the problems of counter-insurgency in semi-modern urban environment (to radically update a process that was built for the last century) and provide the potential for organic development in underdeveloped areas of the world. The key is that we need to support the open source efforts currently underway to expand this capability underway such as the transition towns movement to MIT's low tech solutions effort.

I touched on this concept in Brave New War and here on this blog. Might need to put out a short book that really explores the concept in a way that allows people to get their heads around it.

STATUS UPDATE

I'm on the road this month speaking with/to government/private organizations focused on defense and security. So far, it's been fun. However, given the global financial bloodbath in process, the chaotic future I describe might be much closer (both in timing and to home) than many in my audiences anticipate.

Some food for thought. See my brief on "Big Bangs."

JOURNAL: System Disruption for Economic Gain

The Associated Press has a story that sounds like it was torn from the pages of Brave New War:

Hackers literally turned out the lights in multiple cities after breaking into electrical utilities and demanding extortion payments before disrupting the power, a senior CIA analyst told utility engineers at a U.S. trade conference.

All the break-ins occurred outside the United States, said senior CIA analyst Tom Donahue. The U.S. government believes some of the hackers had inside knowledge to cause the outages. Donahue did not specify what countries were affected, when the outages occurred or how long the outages lasted. He said they happened in "several regions outside the United States."

"In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities," Donahue said in a statement. "We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet."

Bing! Guerrilla entrepreneurs.

LINKS: Terrorist Assault on the Serena

Naser Shahalemi's firsthand account of the assault on the Serena hotel in Kabul (on the Global Affairs blog). Riveting read.

"We sat down, tea in hand and then it began. All of sudden BOOM! A suicide bomber dressed as police had walked into the security X-ray booth with a vest of explosives attached on his chest and blew himself up killing half of the guards in the booth.... More people come to the basement, as the terrorists have infiltrated the gym and spa area. They have shot dead the spa manager, Zina a very pleasant Filipino Girl who was just doing her job working in Afghanistan to support herself and family abroad. The Terrorists move into the gym and shot an American dead in the face on the treadmill.... Hours pass, and we are all sitting and reminiscing about what the hell just happened in front of our eyes who and what we saw. Then all of a sudden two U.S. Marines come down to the basement armed to the teeth, asking everyone if they are all right."

The hotel was a critical node in the international community working out of Kabul. Lots of FUD generated by this attack. Physical assault amplifies the impact of the bombing.

More Links (in process):

"Modeling Urban Panic" using software. Follows up on an earlier post on the principles of "Fear Management" for global guerrillas. Here's more analysis from Shlok Vaidya.

LINKS: NGO's & Hollow States, Economic Black Swans, and Transnational Crime

• NGOs fill the gap. Robert Kaplan writes about the Bangladeshi response to a hollow state. "Waterworld" The Atlantic. Here's his key observation (which is important for those of us thinking about bottoms up resilience):

  "NGOs in Bangladesh represent a whole new organizational life-form; thousands of them fill the void between village committees and a remote, badly functioning central government."

• Economic Black Swans. The NYTimes (Peter Goodman and Floyd Norris) has a choice quote on the loss of domestic economic control and the rise of a global economy rife with systemic uncertainty:

  "Huge and complex, the American economy has in recent years been aided by a global web of finance so elaborate that no one seems capable of fully comprehending it. That makes it all but impossible to predict how much the economy can be expected to fall before it stabilizes."

• Transnational Crime. The Economist reviews Roberto Saviano's book, "Gomorrah" on how the Italian mafia has been transformed by globalization.

  "Once a web of mobsters whose most international activity was smuggling cigarettes, the Camorra eases uninspected Chinese goods into Europe and provides loans at usurious rates to the sweatshops that produce many of the elegant garments Italy sells abroad. It imports arms from eastern Europe and exports them to Basque guerrillas. Its various clans launder money through businesses scattered from Taiwan to Brno, from Miami Beach, Florida, to Five Dock, New South Wales."

• A cartoon by Hugh MacLeod (best known for this mantra: "Blogs are a good way to make things happen indirectly") that's applicable to GG thinking.

LINKS: Media Hacking, Synbio, Wisdom of Crowds, Geoengineering

Here's some things I found interesting (thanks to everyone that contributed):

• Media Hacking. Artists hack broadcast in Czechoslovakia. Video. BBC story.
• Synbio. Craig Venter on a "DNA Driven World." Video. Skip the fluff and start it at 30:00 in. Summary: He argues that we don't have worry about peak oil or global warming. His solution: radically decentralized biorefineries that consume carbon and produce fuel. My NOTE: The real challenge is dealing with how synbio can accelerate individual superempowerment within the context of open source warfare.
• Wisdom of crowds in real-time. Primary markets from the University of Iowa. Democrats & Republicans. Not sure how predictive these are.
• Geoengineering.David Keith presentation on the topic. Jamais Cascio on its implications for warfare. A private firm called Planktos is trying to use geoengineering to create an "ice age" using Martin's iron hypothesis.