Global Guerrillas

What has dominated human conflict since the turn of the Millennium?

Here's an important question.  

What do the following have in common?

• 9/11 and Al Qaeda's subsequent attacks
• The Iraq War (the guerrilla war)
• The Nigerian Conflict (MEND vs. Shell Oil - 2007 -- cause of the oil price spike)
• The Arab Spring (Tunisia/Lybia/Egypt)
• Occupy
• Anonymous
• Snowden/Wikileaks crypto war.

They are all open source conflicts.    

Clearly, open source warfare -- a form of warfare where many participants, motivated for very different reasons, join together to take on a larger foe -- now dominates modern conflict. 

OODA Loops and Markets

Quick refresher.  An OODA loop is a decision making model that John Boyd (America's greatest strategist) formulated. 

Basically, it's a description of how all living organisms make decisions.  Better decision making = improved success.  

OODA consists of four steps in a loop (I've got lots more on this in my book and in past issues of GG):

1. Observe = what's going on?  what is the problem?
2. Orient = what does that data mean (knowledge, experience, culture, etc.)  is it a problem?
3. Decide = what should you do in response to this situation/problem?
4. Act (repeat) = do it.. (go back to the first step to find out if your action solved the problem)

However, many of the decisions we make are are accomplished at the group and societal level.  To do that, we've built organizational frameworks that automate steps in the OODA loop.  The three most common methods at the macro level are:

• Markets -- financial, farmer's, and representational governance
• Hierarchy -- families, corporations, and governments
• Legal -- contracts, remedies, and adjudication.

All three were amazing innovations at the time they were developed.  

In today's world, given that we are all networked and have nearly unlimited processing power at our fingertips...  Not so much.   In fact, the rise of networks is rapidly corrupting the traditional organizational frameworks -- from the programmed trading and derivatives that are destabilizing stock markets to the "big data" bomb that the NSA is currently building to the IP trolls (copyrights and patents) that are destroying innovation. 

BTW:  The Kenyan mall attack appears to be a template (plausible promise) that is aimed at both Kenyan government and the US/Europe.  I suspect it won't successfully ignite action in either area (i.e. multiple Black Friday -- the high holy day of American consumerism -- mall attacks or attacks by other groups on Kenyan targets).

Gilder on the Global Innovation Engine

I'm currently wading through George Gilder's new book, "Knowledge and Power."  

Why?  It's got some good thinking on the new economy that's emerging.  

• In it, he makes the case that wealth is a function of how much innovation (knowledge production) occurs in an economic system.  
• Further, he makes the claim (as I do) that the system that produces the most novelty (fortuitous mistakes) is the one that wins over the long term.  
• The spontaneous emergence of this innovation engine is the reason we live better today than we did 500 years ago.

However, George makes an eggregious mistake.   Simply, George claims that this "innovation engine" and "Capitalism" are the same thing.  

It's not.

Capitalism is simply an organizational framework that uses market mechanisms for information discovery and (scarce) resource allocation.  Bureaucracy is another orgnizational framework does the same thing, but in a different way.

We've been using capitalist markets and bureaucratic hierarchy for thousands of years.   Long before this innovation engine ignited and launched us into the modern world.  That implies this engine is new.  Something that is of a different form/character than the markets/heirarchy we currently use to move the engine forward.  

We've needed both in the past.   For example, we've used markets for allocating resources to innovators (entrepreneurs) and hiearchy for inching science ahead.

However, this is where I go off the reservation a bit.  

I think it's possible to do better than what we've done in the past.  To innovate MUCH faster (hundreds of times faster) than we've done to date.  To do that, we need to think in terms of new organizational frameworks.  Beyond markets and bureaucracy.    

Remember, the innovation system that's moving us forward merely used markets and bureaucracy because they were the most advanced organization forms we had available at the time.  They aren't anymore.  The global network we currently live in, enables us to create new methods of interaction that have the potential to make markets/bureaucracy look clumsy and slow witted in comparison.  

Has the NSA eclipsed the Army/Navy as the premiere US defense organization?

Has the NSA become the premiere defense organization of the USA, eclipsing the Army, Navy and Air Force?

I'm starting to think it has eclipsed all of them combined....  What do you think?

 

Hypercenteralized or hyperdecentralized? Both...

Just got this question from a law student.  

"Love your Global Guerrillas blog, but one thing is on my mind.  The internet seems to not be the decentralized system we all imagine, but is in reality very much controlled by government agencies and ISP providers.  Do you think the internet itself is vulnerable to disruption and would cut off so many of the gains people have made in becoming decentralized.  Thoughts?  Maybe the issue of the centralized nature of the internet could be expanded on?"

Networks do both.  The enable hyper centralization and decentralization.  Since we now live in a networked world, the societal and organizational forms we currently use are being forced to change. 

Within existing systems -- from corporations to nation-states -- were seeing hyper centralization.  Fewer and fewer people will control more wealth and power in this system with each passing year (we can already see it in the trends on wealth both in the US and around the world).   That's going to be good for the top 1% and the people in the remaining 20% that service them.  For the bottom 80%, the working poor, the world is going to feel similar to the world of the peasant/serf of the middle ages.  

In contrast, hyper decentralization (while sometimes hijacked by companies like Google and Facebook), is being used to build systems that will compete with the existing system.  In short, these decentralized systems have the potential to completely rewrite how we organize this world.  

In most cases, the work being done to build decentralized systems, will be opaque to the people running the existing system.  It won't look like a  threat until they have already won (the model for this is how feudalism was replaced by markets -- the nobles didn't know they had lost, as an institution, until they lost their castles to creditors).  

How to deal with Countries that Use Chemical Weapons? Make it Personal

How will "civilized nations" deal with countries that use banned (nukes, chemical, bio..)?

Given the trends underway, we're likely to see less of a conventional response than in the past.  Not only is a conventional response potentially catastrophic -- as we saw when the Bush administration trumped up evidence of WMDs in Iraq and invaded the country in response -- it's not that effective.  

What can we expect to see?  A more direct approach.  The targeting of specific individuals in the hierarchy that made the decision to use the banned weapons.  An extralegal process that doesn't look much like traditional warfare and much more like how nation states hunt "terrorists."

In the case of Syria, the evidence would be presented and adjudicated in an extralegal process.  The portion of the national hierarchy involved in the use of the banned weapon would be deemed a terrorist organization and specific people would be placed onto a target list, prioritized, and then hunted as individuals.

I suspect, as this process matures, targets will be made public (listed on the Internet) and given 60 days to give themselves up).  After that, it's a one way ticket.  Drones away...crowdsourced manhunts...NSA big data...and an eventual explosive death (with the requisite collatoral damage that nobody seems to care about).  

In short, warfare in the 21st century IS becoming very, very direct and very public.  

The countries that continue to pay for the the big weapons and large organizations of the last century are just wasting their money.