Global Guerrillas

JOURNAL: Useful Briefs for the Pandemic

With the swine/avian flu pandemic already at 5/6 on the CDC danger scale, we may all soon find out (following Mexico's lead) what it means to endure a national emergency that cancels all public gatherings, closes borders, stops people from going to work, and creates massive service/product disruptions.  In short:  severe disconnection.  

Here are some quotes/links to two briefs I wrote just before the pandemic (built on concepts pioneered in Brave New War).  It's useful to see it as part of a larger and increasingly common pattern of massive global shocks.  This path inevitably leads to a more resilient design for the global system: one populated by resilient communities (a societal design that makes telecommuting the standard for global knowledge work).  

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Scale invariance is a requirement for societal resilience. It is also something anyone seriously thinking about the topic of resilience must be familiar with. Here's why. Our global system is composed of intermeshed and tightly coupled networks. These interlinked networks enable our system to be efficient and relatively robust against random shocks. However, large shocks can overwhelm this type of network design, causing it to either act erratically (turbulence) or break apart (into smaller clusters via cascades of failure). We saw systemic turbulence in action via the recent brush with a global financial meltdown in September 2008 and we are seeing it currently with erratic swings in markets, trade, and other forms of economic activity. Examples of network failures that result in disconnected clusters are seen with every black-out in the electricity network. A pandemic would be a mix of the two, intentional clustering (quarantines) and high turbulence. 

From the brief:  Resilient Communities and Scale Invariance

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This is interesting from the perspective of societal decision making. Improvements in robustness and increasing returns over the short to medium terms, drives society (from common wisdom to academic doctrines) to assume that our situation will/can only get better and better. This experience has also led to the assumption that radical increases in connectivity (Internet, financial integration, etc.) will only accelerate this process of betterment. However, network analysis indicates that these massive increases in connectivity have made the possibility of an extinction event (cataclysmic Black Swan) much, much higher than in the past. Therefore, assumptions that we will eventually progress (something we have to assume), should be moderated by the fact that our future may be increasingly (more frequently) punctuated by periods of and extreme and prolonged system failure. In that regard, the connectivity we have in this Century makes it truly unique in all of history, and therefore any comparisons to historical experience should be used with extreme caution.  

From the brief:  The Increasing Frequency of Black Swans

JOURNAL: Afghanistan and Black Globalization

Through extortion and taxation, the Taliban are believed to reap as much as $300 million a year from Afghanistan’s opium trade, which now makes up 90 percent of the world’s total. That is enough, the Americans say, to sustain all of the Taliban’s military operations in southern Afghanistan for an entire year.  NYTimes

Globalization continues to melt the map.  Easy access to a huge ($3 trillion and growing), segmented (moving from a closed to an open source structure), and dynamic criminal economy has enabled a relatively impoverished Taliban to become an economic powerhouse in 5 short years.  It now lives off of an economy (opium production valued at $2-3.5 billion a year) the size of many small states and its ability to "tax" this production is estimated to be approximately 15% (strangely, this is just below the same level of taxation the US government has found to be sustainable, protection rackets?).   This economic success, in combination with fears that this "black globalization" will power the Taliban's successful open source insurgency in Pakistan, is driving a new US policy to eradicate poppy production. 

Eradication?

The Marine's BG Nicholson is thinking along the right lines:  “There is a significant portion of the enemy that we believe we can peel off with incentives... We can hire away many of these young men.” 

Despite this global guerilla thinking in the Marines, the advocated approach appears to be heavy handed and will focus on crop eradication and firefights with the Taliban (which means we haven't learned much from Iraq).  Further, the funds available for the construction of an alternative economy (most of which will be siphoned off by big companies and corruption) is a paltry $450 million to replace a $2-3.5 billion economy.  It's also a small fraction of what we are spending on troops in the area.  The likely outcome is a much hotter insurgency in Afghanistan, as the number of fighters swell due to newly impoverished farmers, and a spread of the violence to previously pacified areas as groups move to find new areas to grow.  It may even intensify the spread of the insurgency in Pakistan as members of Afghan groups opt to move to greener pastures in Pakistan.  

Here's some alternative strategies (to get the creative thinking going):   

• Replace.  Become the primary buyer of the crops at the local level.  Slowly ease the farmers into alternative crops at subsidized prices (this is MUCH less expensive than the current massive US troop deployment).
• Divide.  Anoint local militias with the ability to produce opium as long as violence is low and the money stays local.   Divide the groups based on levels of greed vs. fanaticism.

LINKS: PANDEMIC?

In a hyper-connected world, even small events can turn into global disasters (Mexico City's International airport handles 70,000 travelers a day). More:

The BBC has some personal stories (this one was particularly interesting):

I work as a resident doctor in one of the biggest hospitals in Mexico City and sadly, the situation is far from "under control". As a doctor, I realise that the media does not report the truth. Authorities distributed vaccines among all the medical personnel with no results, because two of my partners who worked in this hospital (interns) were killed by this new virus in less than six days even though they were vaccinated as all of us were. The official number of deaths is 20, nevertheless, the true number of victims are more than 200. I understand that we must avoid to panic, but telling the truth it might be better now to prevent and avoid more deaths. 

Reuters on the shutdown of Mexico City:

Mexico has shut schools and museums and canceled hundreds of public events in its sprawling, overcrowded capital of 20 million people to try to prevent further infections... Shopping centers were hushed, restaurant reservations were canceled and everyone from waiters to churchgoers wore face masks. 

Bloomberg on the system disruption potential:

..during the 2003 SARS outbreak in Asia... Travel curbs imposed there damaged economies throughout the region, where that virus circulated most widely. In Singapore, where 33 infected people died, gross domestic product shrank 11.4 percent in the second quarter of 2003 because of the severe acute respiratory syndrome.

UPDATE:  Reuters added more data/estimates of the impact:

The World Bank estimated in 2008 that a flu pandemic could cost $3 trillion and result in a nearly 5 percent drop in world gross domestic product. The World Bank has estimated that more than 70 million people could die worldwide in a severe pandemic.

NYTimes.  Hong Kong's sensor-based measurement and indefinite detention:

Ever since the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, Hong Kong has used infrared scanners to measure the facial temperature of all arrivals at its airport and border crossings with mainland China. Visitors are required to remove any hats to ensure accurate measurement, and children are checked with ear thermometers because the scanners are less reliable in measuring their faces. ....any traveler who has passed through a city with laboratory-confirmed cases and who arrives in Hong Kong with a fever and respiratory symptoms will be intercepted by officials and sent to a hospital to await testing. “Until that test is negative, we won’t allow him out,” he said. 

NOTE:  Unfortunately, the current effort to prevent the global economy's descent into depression is merely an information operation -- an effort to control perception via the manipulation of information/media -- rather than anything of real substance.  Even a mild pandemic could wash that information facade away.

TORTURE AND MORAL ISOLATION

Here's some quick analysis, through the lens of military theory, that concludes that the US shouldn't engage in torture.   To begin, here's a quote from an earlier brief I wrote on "Al Qaeda's Grand Strategy":

Grand strategy, according to John Boyd (arguably America's best military strategist), is a quest to isolate your enemy's (a nation-state or a global terrorist network) thinking processes from connections to the external/reference environment. This process of isolation is essentially the imposition of insanity on a group. To wit: any organism that operates without reference to external stimuli (the real world), falls into a destructive cycle of false internal dialogues. These corrupt internal dialogues eventually cause dissolution and defeat.  

Therefore dynamic of Boyd's grand strategy is to isolate your enemy across three essential spheres (physical, mental, and moral), while at the same time improving your connectivity across those same spheres. 

In short, a primary objective of US grand strategy should be to increase its connectivity within the moral sphere.  The embrace of torture does exactly the opposite.  It self-inflicts moral isolation on the US by violating codes of conduct we profess to uphold.  

This moral isolation creates an internal dialogue plagued by mistrust, menace, and uncertainty.  As a result, non-cooperative centers of gravity organically develop (internal opposition movements) and every decision becomes more difficult to accomplish.  Over a long conflict, like the one we are engaged in, anything that leads to slower and less effective decision making this early in the process is nothing short of a disaster.

PAKISTAN AND OPEN SOURCE WARFARE

Here's some background:  The insurgency in Pakistan isn't one modeled on Mao's method (against which US counter-insurgency doctrine is based).  In those 20th Century insurgencies, the effort was run as a replacement for the nation-state, replete with ideological purity, hierarchical leadership, and wings for government functions.  In modern, 21st Century insurgency, the groups that participate are self run (autonomous) and built from different (usually local) motivations/loyalties.  What leads them to work together is a common dream, a plausible promise of what might be.  Pakistan's open source insurgency was sparked into existence by the Red Mosque siege and has now found a plausible promise -- economic and social justice through land distribution and sharia courts.  Rapid growth is sure to follow. 

As a result, you are going to see many more stories like this (although without a full explanation of the warfare theory that drives it):

The alliance is based on more than shared ideology. “These are tactical alliances,” said a senior American counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss intelligence matters. The Pashtun Taliban and Arab militants, who are part of Al Qaeda, have money, sanctuary, training sites and suicide bombers. The Punjabi militants can provide logistical help in Punjabi cities, like Lahore, including handling bombers and target reconnaissance...   One such joint operation, an American security official said, was the Marriott bombing in Islamabad in September, which killed more than 50 people.

Some more reading:

Open Source Warfare   (original 2004 brief)

Open Source Insurgency >> How to start

The OSW (open source war) Underway in Pakistan   NOTE:  The plausible promise of that earlier brief (from 2007) has been achieved in Swat.  It has now morphed into something more aggressive which is expansible to the entire country (as in, beyond Pashtun motivations).

This is going to be a very interesting summer.

JOURNAL: An Open Source Counter-insurgency for Pakistan?

Among those who are reported to have fled is Fateh Khan, a wealthy Buner businessman. Mr. Khan had been one of the main organizers and financiers of the private armies in Buner.NYTimes 23 April 2009.

Pakistan is on its way to, if not already, a hollow state.  In short, that's a nation-state that controls the capital and has international legitimacy, but has ceded control over much its territory to non-state groups.  Here's some notes on recent developments:

The "Taliban" recently (and quickly) took the town of Buner in northwestern Pakistan and is now consolidating its gains (by making alliances with existing centers of moral legitimacy -- elders, etc.).  Further advances will come.  Like Colombia and Iraq, the best source of opposition to the advance of the Taliban will be from wealthy local land owners, businessmen and tribal elders willing to build/hire their own militias and not from the government's uniformed military or its auxiliaries.  

These militias aren't getting support, instead the opposite is happening: the government is extending authority and legitimacy to the Taliban through promises of self rule (deals should only be made to the extent they divide the opposition).  As these militias fall and the wealth of their owners is distributed (paid off to locals with a cut to the external Taliban warlords making the advance), the Taliban's plausible promise of economic justice and fair sharia rules/courts gets stronger.   This will attract more self-organizing groups to join the effort.

Given the rate of the advance, the Taliban may soon be in a position to cut critical services (energy, water, etc.) to key cities.  

JOURNAL: Disaster Planageddon

The smart response of my friend Chet Richards, the owner/operator of DNI (the Web repository of everything John Boyd), to my earlier post "The Next Attack" prompted me to write this. It's counter-intuitive, and I'd like to be proven wrong.  

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Since 9/11, nearly every branch of government, corporation, and sizable organization has built a plan for a large scale terrorist attack.  In the event of an incident, many organizations would temporarily shut down. Security would be ubiquitous with checkpoints at every entrance. Heavy weapons would be carried and patrols increased. All the money spent on security since 9/11 would be put on display. 

However, at the current moment, the real danger of a new terrorist attack on US soil isn't direct damage (hundreds or thousands of lives lost). Instead, the real danger is from the network effects of that attack on a US economy teetering on the edge of depression. Given this, the simultaneous activation of the plethora of disaster preparedness plans currently in place would likely only serve to amplify the deleterious network effects on the economy -- essentially by imposing a heavy security "tax" on every economic activity undertaken nation-wide (even ignoring the impact of organizational panic on normal economic activity).   It would also justify another round of massive over investment in an already expensive security apparatus, at the very time we are least able to afford it.

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UPDATE:  It looks like this post is generating a healthy debate.   Has the bulk of the homeland security build up been a mistake?  Is it as wrong headed as using a terrorist attack to justify a massive expansion in conventional weapon systems over the last eight years?  

TRENDS IN DECENTRALIZED SECURITY

Oakland, CA is caught in a vice between public unions that won't budge on costs and a loss of control/moral authority brought on by outsourcing security. 

Facing pressure to crack down on crime amid a record budget deficit, Oakland is joining other U.S. cities that are turning over more law-enforcement duties to private armed guards... Hiring private guards is less expensive than hiring new officers. Oakland -- facing a record $80 million budget shortfall -- spends about 65% of its budget for police and fire services, including about $250,000 annually, including benefits and salary, on each police officer. In contrast, for about $200,000 a year the city can contract to hire four private guards..   WSJ "Cash strapped cities try private guards over police"  

Oakland's mistake is trying this on a city wide level where the unions can shut it down.  The alternative is the New Orleans approach which allows local districts the option of setting a special tax to purchase private security.  Here's a flyer for the Maple Area Residents "Security Tax District" (one of seven that have recently opted to set this up).  John MacDonald at RAND conducted a study of similar "empowered districts" in Los Angeles.  

In this report, RAND investigators examined the impact of business improvement dis- tricts (BIDs) on crime and youth violence in Los Angeles (L.A.). BIDs are self-organizing, local public-private organizations that collect assessments and invest in local-area service pro- visions and activities, such as place promotion, street cleaning, and public safety... Relying on a conservative estimate that compared the pre-post BIDs trends in reported crimes for only those areas that eventually adopt a BID, we found that the presence of a BID was associated with significantly reduced rates of robberies and marginally significant reductions in the rates of general violence.

All in all, this is yet another step towards the outcome of a a big think article I wrote back in December of 2007 entitled "Privatopia."   It's a pretty good bit of trend analysis considering that it was written before the crisis.  You can either view it as a description of a dystopia or a utopia (depending on your view point).  Here's a snippet from it:

In the early teens, the government privatization wave that began in the latter half of the 20th century became a tsunami. There have been numerous early studies that have pointed to global events, such as the ongoing ME guerrilla war that entangled US military forces in conflicts from Lebanon to Pakistan, as the cause for this change. However, the key driver -- one that only became apparent after the credit crunch and the associated recession of 2008-10 -- was that the world’s trust in the ability of the US government, at all levels down to the local, to meet its financial obligations had collapsed. Historians now consider this period as the turning point, the first time the US could actually be considered to be on the path to become a privately run state. 

The details of how this happened have been well documented. As confidence collapsed (with the speed that only a completely unregulated global financial market could provide), all levels of the US government fell into varying levels of financial crisis. At first, the natural response by governments unable to raise new funds was to cut their budgets. However, global money managers quickly exposed that paltry effort for band-aid rather than the amputation that was needed. Unable to persuade a resolute marketplace and desperate to maintain a core set of services, governments at all levels began to sell off assets at an accelerating rate (those governmental bodies that delayed or refused to undertake these actions were put into receivership by the courts). 

Roads, waterworks, military bases, schools, parks, and much more were quickly sold at appropriate prices. Attempts by government’s to retain ownership and rent them as multi-year leases were initially successful, but as the crisis deepened the market cooled to these schemes. Within a year of the start of what is incorrectly but popularly termed “The Great Theft,” outright sales of assets to global investment funds, corporations and individuals were by far more common. The speed of this transfer in ownership has been unmatched by any example prior or since. By 2015, less than three years after the panic began, upwards of 60% of all public assets from the national to the local levels were formally in private hands.

JOURNAL: The Next Attack

Al Qaeda proper is focused, rightly from a strategic perspective, on hollowing out Pakistan.  So if there is a terrorist attack on US soil, from which hub of the open source insurgency will it come from?  The strategist Tom Barnett makes the call:

The group involved, al Shabab, is described as a post-9/11 version of al Qaeda: loosely coupled cells and very decentralized. The ties between this group and al Qaeda go way back, and "many in the current leadership cadre are graduates of al Qaeda training camps." AQ vets make up a significant portion of al Shabab's top talent. Then we hear about the wormholes that link Somalia to Minneapolis, Stockholm, Cardiff and Dubai... When the attack finally comes, the evidence trail leading up to it will be vast.

Following global guerrilla warfare theory, here's some quick analysis.  There's been a long enough pause since 9/11 to generate a great deal of psychological shock from a significant new attack.

NOTE:  since the shock value from strategic "blood and guts" terrorism suffers from diminishing returns -- new attacks must either be a) bigger than the first attack or b) delayed until the initial shock wears off -- in order to generate a similar or better shock than the earlier attack.  If a group doesn't follow these rules, they appear diminished and lose brand value.

The attack, if it does come, will likely be suicide bombers (inexpensive wetware that is employed as terminal guidance systems for explosives) that detonate their packages in crowded commercial areas or Mumbai/Kabul style rampages/hostage take overs.  If there is an attack on commercial aviation, it will likely move up the network to the terminal hub area rather than a low yield focus on aircraft.  Breadth and simultaneity will likely be substituted for depth (meaning more places rather than bigger booms), to achieve maximal shock effect.  

Unfortunately, the US is suffering from a new window of vulnerability to this type of attack.  Unlike a year ago, any attack on US commercial areas (retail, transportation, etc.) will have outsized network effects.  Here's why.  Due to a global economic collapse and excessive indebtedness, Americans have cut back on purchases to repair household balance sheets (this is a long running secular shift).  This has put most retail facing firms on the edge of bankruptcy.  Any attack on commercial crowds over a large geographic area would radically reduce already depressed revenues at these firms (and drive costs for security through the roof), as people stay away from crowds until they feel safe again.  So, in an unusual turn of circumstance, blood and guts terrorism is now closely aligned with the multiplicative effect of economic systems disruption.  As a result, the economic damage to the US from an attack of this type as it struggles to ward off economic depression, would be vast.  Firms would wink out of existence at an alarming rate.  Returns on investment (ROIs) from any attack of this type could potentially reach $100 million in economic loses for every $1 in attack costs. 

TRANSITION TOWNS AND PARTICIPATORY PROBLEM SOLVING

Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Towns movement and I have been working on methodologies by which communities can become resilient for about the same amount of time (since 2004-05, building on the earlier work of others).  We have developed different approaches to the same goal and still need to find the time to share notes.  His approach, informed by peak oil and climate change, is focused on a radical reduction in energy usage.  In short, it's a plan to achieve community "energy descent," to provide a buffer against oil price spikes/shortages and reduce any contribution to climate catastrophe.  

However, as I pointed out in my earlier post on the movement, the real value of the Transition Towns approach isn't its emphasis on energy descent (which may neither be sufficient nor ultimately valuable for resilience), but rather its concisely crafted methodology for catalyzing community participation via a messy open source organizational process (which allows people to deviate from the "energy descent approach" if they desire to).  This is exactly the conclusion Jon Mooallem, who wrote a long article for the New York Times on the Transition Towns movement in the US, reached.  The conversation he had with Councilman John T. Reuter, of Sandpoint Idaho (a Transition Towns site) illuminates this:

What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” It was easy to argue that at the initiative’s core, in place of any clearly defined philosophy or strategy, was only a puff of enthusiasm. But Reuter seemed to argue that enthusiasm is an actual asset, a resource our society is already suffering a scarcity of. “There’s just something happening here that’s reviving people’s civic sense of possibility,” he later said. “Politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ right? I think what the Transition Initiative is doing is expanding what’s possible in people’s minds. It is expanding people’s ability to dream bold. And that’s what we need to do: dream bold. Because people have been limited by their own imaginations.”

Reuter had a utopian vision, too: the one laid out in the U.S. Constitution. And the Sandpoint Transition Initiative seemed to be moving Sandpoint closer to that ideal in its own small way, even though it was working out of a totally different handbook. They were managing to make the functioning democracy in their town a little more productive. For a wide range of not-always-consistent reasons, people in Sandpoint decided that Transition could help them build the world they wanted. And now, only because enough people stepped forward and made that decision, Transition actually looked like a good tool for the job. They were picking it up by whatever handle they grasped. They were swinging it as earnestly as they could.

So, being the open source pragmatists that we are, let's borrow/steal from what seems to work (Rob's open source methodology for "unleashing" community participation) and build from there.

THEME SONG

Here's the global guerrillas theme song:  "Twelve Heads in a Bag" by the Krayolas (listen).

JOURNAL: The Plausible Promise of Pakistan's Insurgency

"This was a bloody revolution in Swat. I wouldn’t be surprised if it sweeps the established order of Pakistan."  Pakistani official who oversees Swat to the NYTimes.

Open source insurgencies -- an insurgency composed of many small groups without any hierarchical leadership or organizational structure that typifies 20th Century practice -- needs a single plausible promise or vision that binds the groups together to a common purpose.  It looks like the insurgency (a number of groups collectively known as the Taliban) in Pakistan's Swat valley may have finally found (mostly likely due to the innovation of the "radio mullah" Maulana Fazlullah) a plausible promise that could ignite an open source insurgency that goes well beyond Pashtuns and into the rest of Pakistan.  Simply, a diffuse promise to rectify economic injustice and corruption through the distribution of land and fair (in this case Sharia) courts.  It will be interesting to see if Fazlullah's radio foco will the start of an open source insurgency that hollows Pakistan out in the next couple of years.  I'm betting that it will.  All the West has on its side, is a corrupt system (in collapse due to a a global depression), a mustachioed dictator (to be released as required) and some UAVs.

RESILIENT COMMUNITIES AND SCALE INVARIANCE

In the second installment of the excellent Terminator movie series, Arnold Schwarzenegger (playing a robust robotic Terminator able to absorb terrific damage) faced off against a superior new series of robot, the liquid metal T-1000.  In contrast to Arnold's character, this robot was resilient.  Specifically, if it was blown apart the parts were smart enough and mobile enough to reassemble themselves back into a fully functional T-1000.  What enabled the T-1000 to do this was a weak application of the concept called scale invariance.  Essentially, scale invariance means that across all scaling factors (large, medium, small, tiny, etc.), the properties that define the whole are conserved (intelligence, mobility, form, productivity, etc.).  

Scale invariance is a requirement for societal resilience.  It is also something anyone seriously thinking about the topic of resilience must be familiar with.  Here's why.  Our global system is composed of intermeshed and tightly coupled networks.  These interlinked networks enable our system to be efficient and relatively robust against random shocks.  However, large shocks can overwhelm this type of network design, causing it to either act erratically (turbulence) or break apart (into smaller clusters via cascades of failure).  We saw systemic turbulence in action via the recent brush with a global financial meltdown in September 2008 and we are seeing it currently with erratic swings in markets, trade, and other forms of economic activity.  Examples of network failures that result in disconnected clusters are seen with every black-out in the electricity network.  A pandemic would be a mix of the two, intentional clustering (quarantines) and high turbulence.

In either case, system recovery could be catalyzed and the damage largely mitigated, if our global system was scale invariant.   Basically, this means that if we had communities that could produce at the local level many of the essential products and services currently produced at the global level, handling disconnection or buffering turbulence would be of little consequence (also, it would be much easier for us to find ways of protecting or making redundant the products/services that ONLY could be produced at the global level).  Fortunately, particularly given the substantial uptick in dynamic instability at the global level, we are seeing movement towards scale invariant resilient communities.   These communities can and would be able to operate autonomously regardless of availability, pricing, or quality of external goods/services for extended periods of time.  Unfortunately, this movement may not spread quickly enough to provide any meaningful support to those communities that are utterly dependent on the smooth functioning of the global system.

THE MATHEMATICS OF TERRORISM

Power laws --  a mathematical distribution, usually depicted as a curve, that depicts a low number of large extreme events (on the left) tailing off to a large number of mild events (on the right) -- are good at describing lots of things found in nature and society, from the distribution of cities by population to earthquakes by severity.   Over 50 years ago, power laws were found to describe the severity of casualties in conventional warfare (Richardson).  We've also found that  changes to the slope of the power law can depict the shift from conventional warfare to open source warfare (or 4GW) over the past decades (see relatively recent analysis by Johnson, Spagat, et. al..  that shows casualty distributions for modern conflict are converging on the model for non-G7 terrorism). 

Another recent effort by Clauset and Young entitled, "Scale Invariance in Global Terrorism," studied terrorism data over a thirty-seven year span and concluded that power laws apply to this data set too.  Essentially, that means that despite a marked increase in the frequency in terrorist attacks (this study was focused on "blood and guts" terrorism exclusively), the ratio of large to small attacks, and improvements in weaponry is still the same (the power law curve's exponential is roughly the same). It also shows that 9/11 and other extreme terrorists attacks are merely an expected plot on that curve, and not outliers (although, it was still a black swan).  Some other interesting results include:

• There's been a long running and ongoing decrease in the mean time between attacks, with a big fall in 1998.  See the blue line in the graph inset above.  The sheer volume of terrorist attacks globally is growing at a fairly fast pace.  
• While the data in aggregate is able to account for different weapons, there is an indication that the potential for extreme events is much higher with bioweapons (currently a shallow data set).  Its exponent is 1.8 vs. the 2.3 average for other techniques (except fire).  That means that events are less frequent, but when they occur they are more damaging.  Note, there isn't any curve for nuclear terrorism likely due to the fact that these weapons aren't something small groups can readily access (despite hype to the contrary).
• As expected, the exponents for terrorism in developed (1.71, a steep curve) and developing nations (2.5, a shallow curve) are different.  This means that while there are fewer attacks in developed countries, they tend to be more violent. 

I think that power laws we see in blood and guts terrorism will apply to attacks that focus on systems disruption too.  If so, this is worrisome.  Here's why:

• The data presented shows that fire (arson) is the closest to using systems disruption techniques for "blood and guts" terrorism and it has the lowest exponent at 1.74.  This implies that network effects can radically and potentially irrevocably steepen power law curves such that even badly planned/executed attacks that would have yielded little in "blood and guts" results, can yield exception outcomes via the high ROIs (returns on investment) of system disruption. 
• Steeper curves for system disruption might stay steep even if frequency increases.  Given the ease at which systems disruption can be accomplished (particularly relative to killing people, measured from complexity of method to level of motivation), we have the potential to see a great many of these attacks.  Unfortunately, at the low implied exponential, any increase in systems attack frequency would generate a disproportionate increase in the number and scale of severe results as compared to terrorism over all.
• Finally, bio-terror that focuses on communicable disease (as opposed to biotoxins) would likely be able to access the network effects of systems disruption.  If that method become prevalent, the current exponent we see for bioterrorism, already low at 1.8, could steepen even more despite increases in frequency.  That means lots of big casualty attacks relative to the total number of attacks.  FINAL THOUGHT: the propagation of resilient communities can radically change this assumption, by allowing the scale invariant resilience necessary to break the network-effects of these attacks.

JAMAIS CASCIO ON THE RESILIENT ECONOMY

My friend Jamais Cascio, a prominent futurist, has done some very interesting thinking on how resilience to shocks will shape how our global economy is configured (putting it on equal par with efficiency, etc.).  I tend to see the this new configuration as something that can only be done with the viral propagation of resilient communities (that eventually dot the landscape with sufficient density to protect the whole).  In contrast, I think he implies that resilience could be grafted onto our existing global system with some minor design rework.  Regardless, we both are working on the same thing: cracking the hard nut of issues that are at the core of what it takes to thrive in the future.  

He starts his analysis with a great definition of resilience (from an article in Fast Company):  

Resilience means the capacity of an entity--such as a person, an 
institution, or a system--to withstand sudden, unexpected shocks, 
and (ideally) to be capable of recovering quickly afterwards. 
Resilience implies both strength and flexibility; a resilient 
structure would bend, but would be hard to break.

MY NOTE:  Robustness is an ability to withstand a hit without showing it (think, a football player with padding).   However, if you hit him in the knees... Timber!  Contrast this to the above definition of resilience.

He then focuses on two aspects of resilience (culling concepts from the weeds of current literature on the topic).  Both are worth noting:

• Resilient flexibility means avoiding situations where components of a 
system are "too big to fail"--that is, where the failure of a single 
part can bring the whole thing crashing down. The alternative comes 
from the combination of diversity (lots of different parts), 
collaboration (able to work together), and decentralization (organized 
from the bottom-up). The result is a system that can more effectively 
respond to rapid changes in conditions, and including the unexpected 
loss of components. 

• The recognition that failure happens is the other intrinsic part of a 
resilience approach. Mistakes, malice, pure coincidence--there's no 
way to rule out all possible ways in which a given system can stumble. 
The goal, therefore, should be to make failures easy to spot through 
widespread adoption of transparency through a "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" embrace of 
openness, and to give the system enough redundancy and slack that it's 
possible to absorb the failures that get through. If you know that you 
can't rule out failure, you need to be able to "fail gracefully," in 
the language of design.


Here's his vision fleshed out on his blog (which is very worth subscribing to):

What does this all look like for everyday people? For most of us, it's actually not far off from how we lived a generation ago. We still shop for goods, although the brands are more numerous and there are far fewer "big players" -- and those that emerge tend not to last long. People still go to work, although more and more of us engage in micro-production of goods and intellectual content. And people still lose their jobs and suffer personal economic problems... but, again, there's far less risk of economic catastrophe.... It generates less wealth than traditional capitalism would, at least when it was working well, but is far less prone to wild swings, and has an inherent safety net (what designers call "graceful failure") to cushion downturns.   

Unfortunately, I can't see anything approximating this happening without a shift towards resilient communities.  Why?  It's important to consider how networks fail -- they break into disconnected clusters when under assault.  As a result, scale invariance is important, since no matter how small the temporarily disconnected cluster is, it should still able to operate.  Resilient communities ensure that is the case by geographically dispersing production.  

Finally (danger:  wild eyed optimism to follow), I also disagree that a decentralized resilient economy would generate less wealth than a centralized capitalist global economy.  Why?   It uses (an order of magnitude or more) less space, time, energy, matter, and information to operate (this is called STEMI compression).   Further, this decentralized configuration allows us to ride a long standing technology curve (which points towards doing more and more at a smaller scale) faster than ever before, with (and this is very important) less danger of any single development curve collapsing the whole (see the brief: Catastrophic Superempowerment for more).

JOURNAL: A Global to Local to Global Criminal Example

Nice tersely worded example on how predation by the global economic system helped drive Somali piracy.  From David Axe:

Recall that Somali piracy has its roots in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Somali government threw open the doors to major foreign fishing companies to illegally enter Somali waters and fish out all the tuna, which once comprised one of Somalia’s major commodities. The first Somali pirates were fishermen who decided to render a “fine” on any boats they found illegaly fishing Somali waters. Well, guess what. Piracy has effectively cut in half tuna hauls for major foreign fishing companies working near Somalia, according to Warships International Fleet Review. Today piracy is essentially organized crime, at sea. But the piracy mafia has inadvertently accomplished what the original pirates set out to do. Somali pirates have every reason to be proud. Whether on purpose or not, they have defended their waters while evading the combined might of the world’s navies.

Technology driven connectivity makes it possible for these "remote" groups to take the fight back to the global system.  Remember, in a flat globalized world, everyone is in competition with everyone else.  There aren't any meaningful barriers.  We are going to see this dynamic again and again...

If you find yourself alone and naked in a global gun fight -- tribe up!

PIRATES

Some thinking on Somali pirates:

• Seal snipers took out three Somali pirates and freed an American hostage held in a lifeboat.  What's interesting to me is the decision making process used to resolve this minor problem.  Here are some of the aspects.  Firstly, there was a timer on the hostage stand-off.  Other pirate groups/ships (an open source insurgency with commercial drivers) were en route to surround the lifeboat or take control of the hostages.  Secondly, this minor decision involved a highly centralized decision making loop that included the President, the Commander of CENTCOM, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the DoJ, and the White House/NSC -- just to pull the trigger on three kidnappers holding a hostage at gunpoint.  Lastly, one of the biggest fears of the US government is that these pirates would be arrested.  Why?  Since Somalia is a mess, they would become wards of the US, likely suffer only minimal jail time, and eventually end up applying for US citizenship.  
• The symbiosis between private insurance and privateering dominates.  If the company that owned the rescued ship wasn't a US defense contractor, its kidnapping insurance company (likely Lloyds) and its designated crisis representatives (likely Control Risks Group) would have negotiated to pay the pirate's fee to get the hostage back -- as are thousands of kidnappings from Mexico to Colombia to Nigeria to the Gulf of Aden are settled every year.  Somali pirates have made tens of millions this way already.  Further, in many parts of the world, kidnappers are almost never caught/killed (<5% in Mexico and the same is likely true for Somalia).  So, given this backdrop, the Navy's rescue effort was just a sideshow and the industry that made it possible will continue to grow rapidly.
• Dead end solutions dominate in great power capitals.  The most commonly suggested solutions, patrols by conventional navies and nation-building, aren't the answer.  Both are expensive and would be futile over the longer term.  The Pyrrhic solution that will eventually be adopted is a combination of A) funded militias (Somali anti-pirates that raid pirate dens) and B) business as usual (private sector management ala the symbiosis detailed above).  Might as well cut to the end game and quite the near term charade (I told this to the House Armed Services committee when I testified in early April).

NOTE:  In the comments on this post, "Moon" came up with a term:  The Somali Coast Guard, which may serve as a moniker for a militia effort.  How much would this cost?  

Let's do the numbers.  The short term "solution" that arrested Iraq's descent into state failure was an open source counter-insurgency (aka managed militias) called the Anbar Awakening (not the "surge," which was a costly PR stunt).   That program costs $30 million (plus administration) per month.  1/200 of the cost of maintaining US troops in theater (perversely, the US gov't has offloaded the administration and cost of this program to the Iraqi government, which because it sees the militias as disloyal, isn't paying them anymore -- ultimately, this will lead to a renewed descent into state failure).  A similar program in the Gulf of Aden, using Somali militias, would likely cost $2-3 m a month (guesstimate).  That's a small, small fraction of the cost of patrols by conventional navies and a infinitesimal fraction of what would be a failed nation-building effort in Somalia.  Granted, this is an extremely flawed solution (the militias will end up being lots of trouble), but it is going to be the one eventually adopted.  

THE INCREASING FREQUENCY OF BLACK SWANS

Black Swans (Nassim Taleb) are extreme events that have system wide consequences (9/11, the Internet, financial collapse, etc.). These events typically occur infrequently enough to escape near/mid term analytical methods (as in, most of our analysis is over time horizons that don't measure the occurrence or probability of these events).  As a result, we think Black Swans are exceedingly rare (as in, this can only happen once in a thousand years).  In contrast, Taleb's primary claim re: Black Swans is that they occur much more frequently than typical analysis indicates. Why?  The distributions of systemic outcomes aren't normal/Gaussian, but rather fat tailed (see graph inset).  This is a truism, Mandelbrot's work backs this up.  This led to the aha! moment that sold 1.5 million copies of his book. 

His and my second claim, and one that is harder to prove, is that there are reasons to believe that changes to the underlying global system have made these events much more likely (most worrisome, more prone to negative black swans).   

A systems approach, often discussed on this blog and by Taleb, argues that a combination of hyper-efficiency (JIT supply, financial flows, and tight coupling of all sorts), extreme leverage (high debt), and excessive complexity (derivatives, interlocked supply chains) have introduced dynamic instability into the global economic system.  That instability, if it isn't constantly corrected by an intelligent control system (if it is even possible to build one on a global scale), can lead to catastrophic failure.  For example, high performance aircraft are dynamically unstable by design.  They require constant sub-second control system inputs to bring them back into line or they become smoking craters or lawn darts.  

Another way to is to analyze the stability of our global system is to look at it as a network.  "Cascades of Failure and Extinction in Evolving Complex Systems"  2006, by Paul Ormerod and Rich Colbaugh is a good attempt at doing this.  They used autonomous agents with heterogenous measures of fitness (diversity of goals/needs) to model an evolving network (similar to our economy or global trading/financial system).  Unsurprisingly, they found as they scaled the connectivity of the network it became more fit.  Simply, it allowed each of the agents in the system to better meet their goals for fitness (health, wealth, etc.).  They also found that the network was also able to shrug off more small shocks than ever before (robustness increased).

  

However, this general improvement in fitness and resistance to minor shocks came at a cost.  The more highly connected the network became, the more prone it was to catastrophic failures/extinction events (fragility increased).  Worse, this relationship appears to be non-linear, in that with each increase in connectivity there is a accelerating increase in chance of catastrophic failure.

This is interesting from the perspective of societal decision making.  Improvements in robustness and increasing returns over the short to medium terms, drives society (from common wisdom to academic doctrines) to assume that our situation will/can only get better and better.  This experience has also led to the assumption that radical increases in connectivity (Internet, financial integration, etc.) will only accelerate this process of betterment.  However, network analysis indicates that these massive increases in connectivity have made the possibility of an extinction event (cataclysmic Black Swan) much, much higher than in the past.  Therefore, assumptions that we will eventually progress (something we have to assume), should be moderated by the fact that our future may be increasingly (more frequently) punctuated by periods of and extreme and prolonged system failure.  In that regard, the connectivity we have in this Century makes it truly unique in all of history, and therefore any comparisons to historical experience should be used with extreme caution.

NOTE:  Both Taleb and I conclude that the best way to deal with this risk is to simplify our global economic system.  Taleb recommends that we turn back the clock to a simpler time.  In contrast, I recommend that we organically evolve into a more efficient decentralized system that concentrates on community resilience.  Resilient communities involve intentional decentralization (lower connectivity or an ability to suffer a loss in connectivity without damage), which would radically reduce the chances that large network failures would result in cataclysmic black swans.  We would be able to reboot quickly and with little long term damage.

JOURNAL: Playing with Global Economic Dominos for Fun and Profit

One of the most unappreciated aspects of our global economic system is the ability of small groups, typically driven by greed, to severely disrupt it.  

The oil crisis, that drove prices to nearly $150 a barrel, was due to a combination of a tightly coupled global economic system with a 2 million barrel a day shortfall in supply due to growth in Chinese demand.  That production shortfall was the result of systems disruption.   Small groups of guerrillas in both Iraq (~1 to 1.5 million barrels a day) and Nigeria (up to 1 million barrels a day) routinely blew up pipelines, mostly for personal profit.   The oil spike drove up costs to unacceptable levels for stretched American households.  This resulted in a spike in defaults on subprime mortgages as the economy slowed and marginal household budgets failed.  In parallel a relatively small group of financiers concentrated in a score of companies, added egregious instability into the global financial system (excessive debt and leverage + "too complex to understand" derivatives) for personal profit.  This unstable system amplified these subprime mortgage defaults (a relatively small slice of total debt) into a global financial crisis.  

Nothing has changed.  Much more of this behavior is on the way.  For a more complete preview of how this is done, read Brave New War.  I wrote it with the intent that it would eventually be viewed as the first installment on a definitive manual for 21st Century conflict.

PS.  Being an occasional mercenary, in 2004 I spoke to a dozen huge hedge funds in London (individually) about how the dynamic of small group disruption + extreme global system leverage would drive up oil prices to astounding levels.  Those that headed this advice, made tens hundreds of billions of $$.  

JOURNAL: Just How Easy it to Disrupt Infrastructure?

Here's a great example of how easy it is to disrupt critical infrastructure, without computer skills (which is one of the reasons I believe, based on a broad number of examples, it is a more useful method of warfare).    

Vandals cut off cellular, Internet and landline phone service to 52,000 thousand people today in the San Francisco Bay area.  Cables were cut in two places.  Four ATT fiber optic cables were cut at 1:30 AM at a site adjacent to a highway/railroad and another pair (ATT/Sprint) were cut two hours later in a residential area.  The operation was simple:  lift a heavy manhole cover and cut the cables with a blow torch.  As is the rule, nobody was caught, or likely to be caught.  

This type of attack has become a staple of 21st Century warfare.  Weak groups attack infrastructure, find it is powerful, and amplify their effort.  Learning occurs.  Other weak groups copy the pattern.  Learning is shared via stigmergy and direct collaboration.  As the frequency and quality of the attacks improve, we eventually see routine attacks on systempunkts -- nodes on the network that are so critical, that when they are damaged, it causes cascades of failure and ROIs with incredible multiples.

Here's a fiber optic map via bitgravity

JOURNAL: The Pentagon and Economic Warfare

The Pentagon just completed a wargame that involved overt economic warfare between Russia, China and the US.  While I applaud the DoD for thinking more broadly, the entire premise is completely flawed.  Economic warfare between major economic powers in an integrated world is mutually suicidal (akin to "how can you win a nuclear war?").   The recent financial crisis points to how interlinked we are and how fast a  contagion of distrust can spread.  No, the real threat of economic collapse is due to an inability to effectively manage a dynamically unstable global economy or overspending on security (due to a failure of strategy).  If there is a threat of economic warfare, it is from asymmetric attack by open source enemies (which could make it deniable).  

CYBER THREATS TO INFRASTRUCTURE

There's been a rash of stories about "Chinese spies" probing the networks that control the US electricity network (and the causing a blackout in one case).  As we know already, these networks are the Achilles Heal of modern society and are, by design, are easy to disrupt (efficient organic design creates scale free hubs that can cause cascades of failure).  Successful disruption of these networks can create the fear, uncertainty, and doubt necessary to create widespread societal/economic disruption 

NOTE:   Highly disruptive cyber attacks are still in the early stages of the trend line and can't be considered a major or existential security threat yet.  In contrast, cyber criminality is well along the trend line, and is already heavily "taxing" electronic commerce.

It's clear that the "spy" label used in these articles is being used very loosely (likely an attempt to generate funding for US cyber warfare/defense efforts).  In reality, both China and Russia outsource their cyber warfare to criminal and vigilante groups (part of the long tail of modern warfare).   The benefits of using an open source approach to cyber warfare include:  efficiency (little to no cost), best of breed skills (developed in the criminal economy), and complete deniability (essential for offensive cyber warfare activity).  The costs of this approach is that these groups continue to operate 24/7 -- probing, extorting, coercing, and breaking networks.   Further, the large numbers of people involved means that motives/efforts are all over the map and aren't coordinated.   See this article in the Economist for more. 

Platform Defense:   The US intelligence/defense establishment needs to rethink how they approach this threat.   First, they should focus only on those networks that represent critical infrastructure and defense/political functions (only the most important).  Trying to defend all networks, including those run by corporations, from a threat this broad is futile and overly expensive.  If the set of networks involved is small enough ("a platform" that defines the core network functions of the US), it may be possible to draw a line in the sand around them.  Crossing that boundary would result in a massive effort to find the culprits.

Asymmetry and Rapid Reserves/Militias:  Offensive cyber warfare is an asymmetric threat.  It's impossible to build an offensive institutional capability in this realm.  If it is needed during a time of extreme danger, it can be quickly outsourced to individuals and corporations with the requisite capability (we likely have more and better capability to conduct cyber warfare in the US than anywhere in the world if needed) with nearly zero ramp-up time.  Since the opposition is using individuals and small groups to conduct offensive operations, every effort should be made to identify the hubs (people) of these networks to defuse, interdict, and counter-attack when necessary (piercing the cyber veil and getting to the actual person involved).

Decentralization:  The only long term defense against cyber warfare and offensive cyber criminality (and the threat and disruption will only grow with time as more systems are integrated), is to move towards resilient communities.  At that point, cyber attacks will be little more than an annoyance.

FINAL NOTE:  Since Russia and China don't control their open source cyber capability, we may see an offensive event that causes mass disruption in the US/Europe.  If it is large and deep enough, it could result in a cascade of events that result in war (and potentially even MAD) if we continue to think in terms of legacy notions of terrorism and cyber warfare (in that it can only be state sponsored or controlled).  

Nils Gilman, of Monitor, has a good article on this (their research also confirms the points made above) in the IET.

GG LINKS: Early April 2009

Some items of interest:

• I've added a search function for Global Guerrillas (below right) as an alternative to the archive.  Over five years of content from the first post to sift through (unfortunately, it appears I missed the anniversary of the site).  
• Gorilla Designs has come up with something to do with all of those shipping containers left vacant by a depression in global trade.  Turn them into homes that can withstand extreme weather. 
• California:  "A retired truck driver and Vietnam War veteran said Monday that he is forming an armed militia - mostly men with rifles and armbands, four to a car - to patrol Stockton this summer, when at least 43 police officers are to be laid off."  "Stockton's violent crime rate is among the highest in the state."
• Article on local currencies in USA Today.   Nice quote from Jackie Smith in South Bend Indiana: "It reinforces the message that having more control of the economy in local hands can help you cushion yourself from the blows of the marketplace."
• LA gangs and real-estate fraud.    
• CNN.  Piracy business models spreading virally from Somalia to Nigeria. 
• Jakub Grygiel, an analyst at the Hoover Institution, has adopted a Global Guerrilla approach to foreign policy analysis.  In his recent article, "The Power of Statelessness," he does a good job applying the concepts (which should be familiar to readers of Brave New War and this blog).   Glad to have him on board. 
• Somali pirates take a ship (owned by a US DoD shipping contractor).   Crew (20 US) disable ship.  Dead in the water, the pirates adapt, take the captain hostage and flee the ship.  They negotiate for his release via satellite phone.  For small violent groups interested in making a buck, the global economy is just a phone call away.
• Mexico's President Calderon.  "There is trafficking in Mexico because there is corruption in Mexico..." "But by the same argument if there is trafficking in the United States it is because there is some corruption in the United States... It is impossible to pass tonnes of cocaine to the United States without the complicity of some American authorities." See interview.

JOURNAL: Taleb's 10 Rules to reduce financial Black Swans

Nassim Taleb (the author of The Black Swan) has published 10 rules to reduce the dynamic instability of the global financial system.  Nothing on this list will be implemented.

JOURNAL: Whither Conventional Military Force?

There are two potential use cases for conventional forces (this is likely similar to what Gates is thinking as he proposes cuts/restructuring):

1. Against a peer competitor.  Simply, a country like Russia or China that has a force that can deploy top of the line technology and significant manpower.    
2. Against a proxy of a peer competitor, that is supplied with top of the line weapon systems but non-nuclear.

There are significant caveats with both scenarios.  

Wars with Peer Competitors

Peer competitors are, nearly by definition, nuclear powers.  We have never had a "hot" conventional conflict with a country armed with nuclear weapons.  Simply, a war of that type (the historian Martin Van Creveld makes the case for this better than me), would risk a global nuclear catastrophe.  This makes a conventional conflict with a peer competitor merely a fantasy.  In reality, the role of conventional forces in this type of conflict, is as a deployable trip wire.  This means that the conventional forces we have must be able to deploy in great enough mass to edges of what we consider inviolate territory -- as in the loss or damage to these forces would force a nuclear war.  

Wars with Peer Armed Proxies

In this class of conflict, the peer competitor arms a proxy nation with top of the line weapons.  Unlike during the Cold War, the arming of these nations, isn't a politically driven process. It is economic.  Countries can only get as many weapons as they are able to afford (considerably less than during the peak of the Cold War).  Therefore, conflicts with countries of this type, would be against a competitive force that is relatively weakly armed in terms of high end weapons.  Additionally, since we are all economically interconnected now, it's unclear how many nations would actually fall into this group.  The number is likely already very small and shrinking.

What this means
In the past years, we have spent $400 billion plus on conventional weapons systems and personnel per year.  Given the budgetary pressures we are currently facing, this amount could be reduced by half or more without sacrificing any measure of security given the threat we could face today or in the future.  If a more specific number is needed, perhaps a measure of spending that corresponds to the defense budgets of both China and Russia combined would be a good starting point.

NOTE:  In contrast to the above, spending on special operations, resilient community technologies/development, etc. should be increasing.  The number of scenarios for this type of capability are multiplying.

ECONOMIC CANCER

Here's a follow-up to an earlier brief on the centralization of economic decision making in the hands of a relatively small global financial network (see: "America's Economy and Open Decision Making").  In that brief, I point out how the median incomes -- arguably the only real indicator of economic progress -- of American workers haven't improved since 1974 (a process likely repeated in all developed countries).  The Economist (in addition to providing the graphic) explains:

In 2007, according to the Census Bureau, the median income of American male workers was $45,113, less than the $45,879 (in 2007 money) that they earned back in 1978 (see chart 4). At no point over that 29-year period did median incomes pass the $46,000 mark. Families made ends meet because more women worked (and their real incomes did rise) and because they were able to borrow money to maintain their spending.

Essentially, it shows how the post-WW2 social contract that linked productivity improvements to median income gains was shattered in 1974.  Since then, the value created by a doubling of productivity went to global capital markets instead of doubling incomes for employees.  Nominally, this decision was made under the assumption that this money would be more efficiently allocated by the global financial network than individuals.  In reality, it was likely parasitic predation by a relatively small network that found out how to co-opt the economic system's core functions, in a process that is identical to how cancer co-opts the host's systems of cellular metabolism to grow rapidly (for more on how this works, read my earlier brief on "Bow-Tie Control Systems").  

Of course, this money wasn't invested wisely.  It was gambled away and spent on excess by the members of this network.  So, two generations of American economic wealth was squandered and the American middle class went deeply in debt keeping up appearances of progress.  Worse, it can be argued that the host is dying, and its spending its dwindling metabolic resources providing life support for this parasitic and cancerous network.

NOTE:  Here's an interesting aside, new data indicates that the Arctic's ice is melting faster than expected.   It might be ice free by 2015.  It's yet another example of how the current economic system (in technical terms, the substrate) is devolving into turbulence.  Of course, if this true, it result will either be radical simplification (collapse/road warrior) or a new much more efficient substrate (resilient communities).

MY TESTIMONY

Download Congressional Testimony 

Here's the testimony I'll be giving to Congressman Ike Skelton and his HASC (House Armed Services) subcommittee on Thursday.  It's very short and sweet and somewhat of a snowmobile (as per John Boyd, in that it attempts to combine current trends in new ways to build more effective models and frameworks for decision making) since it includes an analysis of the impact of the current economic meltdown on security.  

Essentially, it says that if we had problems with global guerrillas during a period of massive wealth creation, we are in a world of hurt during a period of massive wealth destruction.   

Very sure that anything I say do won't make any difference.  However, it can't be said I didn't try.

Here's an audiocast of the hearing.  It was in the main hearing room.  I sat basically where Petraeus was earlier that morning when he argued for an expanded effort in Afghanistan.  

Testimony on Thursday

From the invitation:

You are invited to testify before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capability on Terrorism and the New Age of Irregular Warfare: Challenges and Opportunities on Thursday, April 2, 2009, 3:30 PM in room 2118 Rayburn House.

Also, Shlok Vaidya, an excellent thinker and author of Naxalite Rage, is now available after a year in think tank land (a location akin to the tar pits of the Pleistocene...).   He'd be a tremendous addition to any team.