JOURNAL: Economic Failure Means Growth For GGs

For global guerrillas, the collapse of the global economic system will be a boom time. Money will flow and operations will expand like never before. Here's why:

• Profits zoom. As trade barriers rise (inevitable given China's focus on an export led recovery) and economic dislocation leads to shortages, global guerrillas will profit mightily from smuggling operations (which are already huge and growing rapidly). In short, the invisible hand of the now dominant global market system will bless them with success.
  
• Corruption will be easier. Many, if not most, nation-states and corporations will be at or near bankruptcy. Budgets will be slashed, pensions cut to the bone, and mass lay-offs will abound. As a result, the costs of corrupting government and industry employees will fall dramatically.
  
• Less interference. With nation-state budgets cut to the bone and the little available spent on stimulus and bailouts, security budgets will be slashed. The equipment used by many security forces will quickly slip into disrepair and much of it sold to the black market. Further, training and pay will suffer for security personnel, with a corresponding drop in moral. Global guerrillas will find that engagements with government security forces become much easier as the crisis wears on.
  

Organic Legitimacy
So, where will many groups invest these profits? The investment with the highest return is in legitimacy.

Here's why. The nation-state is rapidly losing legitimacy, world-wide, since it increasingly can't or won't provide stability, security, and other forms of political goods. Global guerrillas that fill this gap by providing a wide variety of political goods (example from Hamas) to local populations, as we are seeing with groups from the Naxalites to Hezbollah to Hamas to the Taliban to the Mahdi Army to LeT, can become irremovable fixtures of the local landscape (by either weak/hollow national governments or foreign forces). Some of the benefits include:

• Vast pools of highly motivated manpower to draw upon.
  
• Information dominance.
  
• Permanent sanctuary.