Book review: “Brave New War”
One recent nonfiction book release of interest is John Robb’s Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization. Robb is a veteran of the Special Forces, where he was a counterterrorism operation planner and commander, and in recent years he has been publishing his analysis of armed conflict on a blog called “Global Guerrillas.” The content, as could easily be guessed from the title, is a novel theory about current and future developments in terrorism. Robb’s arguments are not uncontroversial, a point that he freely admits in his introduction, but they weave together many profound truths. He points out that the technology tools available today give small groups unprecedented new capabilities, which include the ability to compete with governments in the organized use of force for political goals. Goals that previously required a large organization now can be accomplished with only a small group, which lowers the threshold for pursuing political goals, encouraging any and every group with a grievance to take up arms. Terrorism is one tactic that these groups can use, but Robb argues that we’re seeing evidence that systems disruption — sabotage — is a far more efficient use of their effort. With our present increase in the globalization of commerce, most countries depend on economic growth for governmental legitimacy, but the infrastructural systems that underlie the economy are largely unsecured. It takes relatively little effort for a saboteur to locate what Robb terms the systempunkt: the weak point in an infrastructural system that will cause cascading failure. The craft of exploiting the systempunkt for political gain is being honed to a fine art by the insurgents in Iraq, where infrastructure attacks are being carried out with systematic regularity in order to kneecap American efforts at nation-building. He argues that there is no reason to believe that the fighters developing the tradecraft of systems disruption in Iraq today will not fan out elsewhere in the world in the coming years, carrying their fight to other countries and spreading their practices by instruction and example. What makes this threat new and therefore difficult for governments to understand is that the stakes are different than those that animated insurgencies for most of the 20th century: many of the smaller-scale political goals are varied and blurry, encompassing everything from traditional demands for land redistribution to pure criminal enterprise. The criminal goals, in particular, can often be achieved by chipping away at state authority to create temporary autonomous zones, a goal that falls far shy of competing with the state for complete territorial dominance. These micro-insurgencies will come in many flavors, he argues, but each is a fly on the back of states’ attempts to assert their authority. If they are successful, globalization will face a significant challenge.
