Reason Magazine - Contributors

Open-Source Warfare

info@reason.com (Jim Henley) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, by John Robb, Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 224 pages, $24.95

At the end of Alfred Bester’s 1956 science fiction novel The Stars My Destination, protagonist and anti-hero Gully Foyle broadcasts the secret of PyrE to every man, woman, and child on the planet. PyrE, the ultimate “weapon of mass destruction,” is compact and unimaginably powerful, and it can be detonated with but a thought. Foyle’s government calls him “insane,” but he says humanity will survive the knowledge of PyrE if it deserves to: “Let the world make its own choice between life and death. Why should we be saddled with the responsibility?”

In Brave New War, John Robb informs us that Foyle’s future is fast approaching. “The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct warfare has finally been breached,” Robb writes, “and we are only starting to feel its effects. Over time, perhaps in as little as 20 years, and as the leverage provided by technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination—with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win” (emphasis in original).

A former Air Force officer and current corporate security consultant, Robb devotes little space to so-called weapons of mass destruction. Chemical and biological arms are just not massively destructive, he argues, and nuclear weapons are much harder for small groups to acquire and use than most terrorism assessments suggest. The weapon of choice that Robb identifies is systems disruption. What Robb calls “global guerrillas”—“super-empowered” bands “riding on the leverage provided by rapid technological improvement and global integration”—are increasingly able to identify the points of failure within vulnerable networks, from power grids to fuel pipelines to communities of trust within a nation-state, and strike them intelligently and inexpensively. The result: cascading failures and damage orders of magnitude greater than the cost of the attack.

Robb’s key example: “In the summer of 2004, Iraq’s global guerrillas attacked a southern section of the Iraqi oil pipeline infrastructure (Iraq has over 4,300 miles of pipelines). This attack cost the attackers an estimated $2,000 to produce. None of the attackers was caught. The effects of this attack were over $50 million in lost oil exports. The rate of return: 250,000 times the cost of the attack.”

According to Robb, global guerrillas practice “open-source warfare” in a marketplace of exceptionally
violent ideas. Like Linux programmers or Wikipedia editors, they operate in a decentralized, voluntarist, plugged-in mode, drawing on enthusiasm, experiment, and the exchange of ideas.

From their cradle in post-Saddam Iraq, the methods of open-source warfare have spread to Pakistan, Russia, Nigeria, and beyond. Ever smaller groups can flout the nation-state’s monopoly on legitimating force; ever smaller groups can prevent the nation-state from delivering even elementary security or minimal services. Robb argues, persuasively, that the nation-state’s instinctive acts of self-preservation—centralizing security even further, launching preventive wars—will prove not just useless but counterproductive.

Robb is implicitly claiming open-source, systems-disrupting insurgency as the latest step in the military theorist William Lind’s famous “generations” of warfare. According to Lind, we’ve moved from mass attrition war (the first generation, á la Napoleon) through industrial warfare (the second generation, á la the American Civil War and most of World War I) to maneuver/blitzkrieg warfare (the third generation, seen in late World War I and early World War II) to asymmetrical conflicts between states and nonstate forces (the fourth generation).

As Robb shows, the lesson Saddam drew from the success of coalition air power in the 1991 war was that you didn’t need an air force to disrupt Iraqi infrastructure. He spent the next dozen years preparing irregular forces to do the same work more cheaply, as a defensive strategy. Unable to compete with America’s conventional power, Saddam planned to frustrate any U.S. invasion after the fact, as the Iraq Survey Group determined in its postwar interviews with Ba’athist ex-officials. While the U.S. captured Saddam himself within a few months of the invasion, the guerrilla infrastructure and system-disrupting methods survived him.

Systems disruption as Saddam conceived it was an evolution of the standard military concept of “area denial.” Ancient retreating armies burned crops to keep invaders from eating them. Scorched-earth tactics persisted into World War II, and partisans have been harassing supply lines at least since the original guerrilla war against Napoleon in Spain. Sabotage, too, has always been with us. And the ideal in weapons system development has long been to counter your rival’s very expensive thing with your really cheap one—the $1,000 missile that can bring down a $1 million helicopter, for example.

What’s new is the technological empowerment of sub-state actors and the systems interdependence we’ve come to call globalization. Together, Robb argues, these developments allow sub-national groups to wage war not just tactically but strategically and successfully. Old scorched-earth tactics were a useful adjunct to main-force warfare: They could keep an enemy discombobulated long enough for you to bring conventional forces to bear. Think of Soviet partisans buying time for the Red Army to reorganize, rearm, and drive the Wehrmacht back in the massive offenses of the later years of the Eastern Front. Old guerrilla operations created the conditions in which insurgents could raise up forces capable of taking on and defeating a state army, as when the People’s Liberation Army eventually prevailed against the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War. But the new systems disruption strategy, Robb writes, is itself sufficient to win. It’s not a precursor to conventional military triumph but an independent path to victory, as the “global guerrillas” define victory.

Robb’s penultimate chapter, “Rethinking Security,” discusses the smart way today’s “market-states” can ensure resilience against global guerrillas and other network failures. A “market-state”—Robb takes the term from the legal scholar and historian of warfare Philip Bobbitt—is a putatively post-bureaucratic government that “secures political legitimacy through the active pursuit of opportunity for its citizens but declines to specify the goals for which that opportunity is used.” Robb believes these marvelous institutions predominate in the developed world. He uses “market-state” as an umbrella term that covers systems as various as the U.S. (an “entrepreneurial market-state”), the European Union (a “managerial market-state”), and the “mercantile market-states” we used to call the Asian Tigers: Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. I have trouble seeing any of these countries as meaningfully post-bureaucratic, but Robb reports that Bobbitt believes they are “in various phases of the transition” to full market-statehood.

Robb rejects the Bush administration’s favored counter-terror strategies of untrammeled surveillance at home and “pre-emptive” war to transform civilizations abroad. He instead favors decentralized, flexible infrastructure and security networks such as “plug-dumb,” two-way electrical grids where end-users can store, produce, and sell back electricity, improving redundancy and diversity. The theory is that the more flexibility nations build into their infrastructure, the less likely it is that terror attacks (or other disasters) can cause cascading, catastrophic failure.

There is a lot to admire in Robb’s analysis, but there’s a substantial problem too. He detects common methods used by actors as various as Islamist terror groups and Latin American drug cartels, then attributes a common goal to them: to “hollow out the state.” But the evidence that global guerrillas want to create failed states ranges from weak to contrary. By Robb’s own admission, the Ba’athist insurgency prepared by Saddam Hussein hoped to return Iraq to Ba’athist rule. Al Qaeda in Iraq proclaimed an “Islamic State of Iraq” in October 2006, well within the tradition of guerrilla forces declaring provisional governments on the road to power. Chechen separatists have launched systems disruption attacks against Russia, and their goal is not to hollow out the Russian state but to create a Chechen one.

Robb himself reports that Nigeria’s MEND (the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) demands “$1.5 billion in restitution (for environmental damage and other problems) from Shell Oil to the local state government and the release of militia and local government leaders.” Similarly, Pakistan’s Balochs “are demanding the termination of the development going into a local port facility and a greater share of the wealth generated by local natural gas deposits.” Robb summarizes the two situations this way: “In their minds, if the state fails, they win.” That is a bizarre gloss. The demands indicate that MEND and the Balochs believe the state has already failed them; they’re waging war to compel a better deal.

Such distinctions matter because Robb claims global guerrillas can successfully wage strategic war on nation-states. But a successful strategic war is one in which a guerrilla group attains its strategic goals. If global guerrillas really just want failed states, the world has no shortage, and Robb is correct. If they want the things guerrilla groups have always wanted—regional autonomy, a greater share of the economic pie, dominion over ethnic or sectarian rivals, an end to foreign occupation, social revolution, national control—it’s much harder to say that any global guerrilla group has yet been “successful.”

Take Iraq’s Sunni insurgents. They have frustrated the consolidation of a post-Saddam government dominated by the country’s Shiite majority. They have kept the United States from turning its presence in Iraq into a secure base for regional power projection. But as of the autumn of 2007, Shiite militias have successfully cleansed most of Baghdad of Sunnis. Sunnis are no closer to taking control of Iraq. And against the wishes of a majority of the American people, the leadership of both major U.S. political parties envisions an indefinite “residual” military presence there. That’s some victory. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden’s hemisphere-spanning Caliphate has yet to materialize, and MEND still doesn’t have its reparations from Shell Oil.

What most of the global guerrilla groups have managed so far is to not lose. It’s a truism of counterinsurgency that “guerrillas win by not losing,” but successful guerrilla movements eventually win by winning. It’s much harder for global guerrillas to “win” than Robb thinks, because most of these groups have larger goals than he acknowledges.

This oversimplification relates to another of the book’s conceptual problems. Robb refers to the damage a global guerrilla attack causes as its “return on investment”: Spend $2,000 to attack a pipeline, as MEND did in one of Robb’s examples, and get a “return” of $50 million in lost revenue to Shell. But this isn’t really a return on investment as the term is used in economics, because the attackers don’t have $50 million when they’re done. Shell has lost $50 million or so, and the insurgents clearly have increased their utility somewhat; they obviously wanted to destroy that pipeline more than they wanted the $2,000. But it seems implausible to value their increased utility at anything close to $50 million. It’s a perfect illustration of the Australian economist John Quiggin’s dictum that war is a negative-sum game. The combined MEND/Shell system is worth a lot less after the exercise than it was worth before.

This point matters because the relative unattractiveness of open-source insurgency may prove more limiting than anything senescent nation-states do to combat it. Global guerrillas have proven they can keep weak states from functioning but not that they can forge strong states of their own. Iraq’s Sunni insurgents are depriving not just the country’s Shiites of electricity and potable water but themselves too.

As of fall 2007, even many Sunni tribal leaders appear to have soured on “open-source warfare” as a strategy for dealing with American and Iraqi Shiite power. The meaning of the so-called “Anbar awakening” is open to interpretation, and disputed. A Brave New War devotee might argue that the Sunni sheikhs are enjoying —at least temporarily—the fruits of an open-source warfare victory. The U.S. government resisted making deals with the tribes for years. Now, after years of open-source insurgency made Iraq ungovernable, the Americans are showering the sheikhs with money and weapons and pressing the Shiite-controlled government to give the Sunnis a bigger piece of the pie.

But the Sunni demands—government jobs, a formal share of state power—seem to refute the idea that failed states are global guerrillas’ goal. Given the Shiite-Kurdish government’s resistance to resolving issues of distributing oil wealth and patronage, and its reluctance to integrate former Sunni guerrillas into the Iraqi Security Forces, it remains to be seen how long the relative quiet will last. (And Iraq remains one of the most violent places on Earth, with millions of internal and external exiles.)

The real lesson of the global guerrilla phenomenon is social, and the social angle is what Brave New War most scants. Global guerrillas have raised the stakes on consent. The experience of post-Saddam Iraq, for instance, suggests that no state or corporate entity can secure an oil distribution network that a sufficiently alienated out-group can’t reach. Consider how heavily Saudi Arabia’s eastern fields depend on Shiite workers, and figure the chances that the Saudi royal family or the American armed forces could guarantee production in the aftermath of a U.S. attack on Shiite Iran.

Resilience in critical systems is all well and good, but as Gully Foyle could tell us, the long-term hope of coping with the global guerrilla phenomenon lies in finding ways to stop pissing each other off so much.

Jim Henley runs the weblog Unqualified Offerings at highclearing.com.

Ticking Bombast

info@reason.com (Jim Henley) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 15:00:00 EST

Let’s say you’ve caught a suspect and you’re sure he’s a terrorist, and you’re sure there’s a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan, and you’re sure he knows where it is, and you’re sure this particular terrorist has been trained to resist torture just long enough that you could never get the true location of the bomb out of him in time. But you’re also sure this particular terrorist is a pervert! And he tells you that if you’ll rape your own child in front of him, he’ll tell you exactly where the bomb is and how to disarm it. And you’re sure that he will, because your intelligence is that good in exactly that way.

Wow! Fascinating hypothetical, huh? And it’s only slightly more far-fetched than the more familiar ticking time bomb scenario, in which you must torture the suspect to save all those innocent people. Both versions have to be laid out awfully precisely. In my scenario, I even assume the nuclear terrorist has been trained to resist torture for a time. Improbably, Alan Dershowitz—the torture enthusiast and original time bomb booster—does not.

So how come we hear so much about the torture quandary and nothing about mine? Why, according to Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay in a November 2005 Knight-Ridder report, has Dick Cheney adverted to the Alan Dershowitz version “several times” and mine never? Why does Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) tell the New York Daily News editorial board that various torture techniques “are very rare, but if they occur there has to be some lawful authority for pursuing that,” at least in “those instances where we have sufficient basis to believe that there is something imminent,” but never says anything about creating “some lawful authority” for emergency incest?

The answer is simple: State agents don’t have any ambition to rape their own children.

This is a clue to the real misdirection of the ticking bomb scenario. It’s always presented as a “What would you do?” dilemma, but in truth it has nothing to do with you. The proper question is: “What should we allow officials embedded in the security bureaucracy to do with impunity? What shall we let their bosses order without legal repercussion?”

You could construct 100 hypotheticals involving utilitarian tradeoffs and terrorism, none less plausible or implausible than the first. What if the suspect demands you fix the World Series and this was your team’s best chance at a championship in 50 years? What if he says he’ll tell you where the bomb is if someone will explain the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, in words he can understand? What if he’ll make sure the bomb doesn’t go off in exchange for a ride on the space shuttle? Hey—it could happen.

If you could stop a bomb from killing 1 million Manhattanites at the cost of your own life, would you do it? What if it would mean imprisonment for the rest of your life? Could you live with yourself if you let all those people die for your own comfort? If you couldn’t, and you somehow just had to torture this bad guy to stop the bomb, then you ought to do it anyway and face your punishment. Right? Leave possible pardons and runaway juries aside. We are hard men for hard times, and we want hard make-believe conundrums.

Here’s another poser: Suppose you’re an innocent suspect whom your captors are convinced is a terrorist. They don’t believe your protestations, so they decide to torture you into a confession. The more you protest your innocence, the more frustrated they get that you won’t “crack.” What do you say to get them to stop? How do you get them not to decide they need to hurt you even more?

That puzzle has two features that make it unpopular with torture advocates. It asks you to sympathize with the victim rather than the perpetrator. And for too many people, it isn’t a hypothetical at all.

Jim Henley lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and runs the weblog Unqualified Offerings (highclearing.com).

Dana Geld

info@reason.com (Jim Henley) — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 00:00:00 EST

If I thought there should be a National Endowment for the Arts, I'd probably want Dana Gioia to run it. To my tastes he's a very good poet, a better critic and something approaching a genius at arts entrepreneurship—and before you scorn this last talent I have two words for you: Ezra Pound. When I met Gioia in the mid-1990s, he was travelling the country giving poetry readings and lectures in the wake of the sensation caused by his influential book-length essay "Can Poetry Matter". Gioia made it his mission to bring like-minded souls together: If there were two people in Loudon County who loved metrical poetry or tonal art music, Gioia wanted to make sure they had each other's phone numbers and would be in touch with each other long after he had flown home. The Gioia of community college parking lots and small town galleries was a marvel of catalysis. His efforts culminated in the West Chester University Poetry Conference, which continues to this day.

He has had as much success at motivating congresspeople and first ladies as aspiring writers. Viewed in terms of his official mission, his leadership of the NEA has to count as an astounding success. Cultivating rather than scorning influential Republican legislators and putting the NEA's least controversial work front and center, like the Shakespeare in American Communities project and the Jazz Masters series, Gioia has bagged the NEA its largest proposed funding increase in twenty years. Roger Kimball, bluest of bluestockings with a nose to match, is beside himself with glee:

Within a matter of months, Mr. Gioia has transformed that moribund institution into a vibrant force for the preservation and transmission of artistic culture. He has cut out the cutting edge and put back the art. Instead of supporting repellent "transgressive" freaks, he has instituted an important new program to bring Shakespeare to communities across America. And by Shakespeare I mean Shakespeare, not some PoMo rendition that portrays Hamlet in drag or sets A Midsummer Night's Dream in a concentration camp.

The usual libertarian objections apply. The Dana Gioia of the reading series inspired people to put their own time and money into a particular vision of cultural renewal. The Dana Gioia of the corridors inspires officials to spend other people's money. (One reason Gioia had to go the Johnny Appleseed route of establishing small groves of literary revolution—or counterrevolution if you insist—was that the movement's enemies controlled the official sources of sponsorship like the NEA.) However happy Roger Kimball is today, future Presidents and directors will fund things that curl Kimball's leg hair, and the NEA of his nightmares will be the stronger for the success of the NEA of his fleeting dreams.

Viewed dispassionately, bringing culture to "underserved communities" is just another form of pork, outlays spread among as many congressional districts as possible. How underserved is America, Shakespearewise, anyway? According to the official tour guide, the organization brought Othello to Fayetteville, home of the University of Arkansas and the Walton Arts Center where the play took place, and the Drama Theatre in Fowler Performing Arts Center at Arkansas State University. Are these places really deserts of Shakespearean performance?

Those are political objections and I buy every one of them. But my real desire to abolish the NEA is for the sake of the arts. It's true enough that, as Jacob Sullum reminds us, the NEA's budget amounts to about one percent of American arts funding. But that doesn't tell the whole story.

Years ago, tragedy struck the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland when the Clinton-era NEA declined to renew the Center's grant because it was not doing enough "outreach." In his lament in the organization's newsletter, Director Allan Lefcowitz explained why the loss was such a problem: an NEA grant has a multiplier effect. The major foundations view it as a Seal of Approval. NEA money attracts anxious private money.

If the NEA's outsized influence on private giving struck Lefcowitz as a problem, he was too tactful to say so. But it strikes me as one. The NEA has been an excuse for private donors to abdicate the responsibilities of connoisseurship. Not only did we have plenty of Shakespeare before the NEA, we had real patronage. John Quinn paid for modernism out of his own pocket, bankrolling Yeats, Eliot and Joyce at various times. He didn't look for official sanction before doing so. Get rid of the Official 1 percent, and perhaps the Unofficial 99 percent might recover a modicum of Quinn's courage—maybe find the next Young Dana Gioia out on the road, or he them.