Casual Fridays

John Robb's "Brave New War" is not a long read, at less than 200 pages. Robb does take the reader on a wild ride, and it's not as detailed or academic as some would prefer. I'm late to the party on reviewing this book, but I have to say that I liked it. He takes the concept of fourth generation warfare and extends it into practical theory, postulating where the fourth gen actors might take these tactics to fruition.

I want to address two passages that I found particularly interesting. First he discusses the distinct new nature of fourth gen warfare:

The threat posed by al-Qaeda and other emerging groups is different. It is not at war with us over the replacement of the state but over who controls the power a state exercises. Al-Qaeda doesn't want to govern Iraq or Saudi Arabia. It wants to collapse them and exercise power through feudal relationships in the vacuum created by their failure. This stance is exemplified by al-Qaeda's relationship with the Taliban in Afghanistan. In 1996, when Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, he didn't maneuver to gain control or wield power over a newly emerging Islamic state. No, that would have been a uniquely twentieth-century goal. Instead, he was eager to build a new type of organization that operated in parallel and in concert with the Taliban in within the same territory.

This may not be new to some, but it struck me as significant that non-state actors can (and do) seek out these kind of territories where they don't have to bother running the civil services, but they can take advantage of modern conveniences to train and equip their forces. It's my belief that our military and civilian leaders in DOD haven't quite figured this out, thus the difficulty in trying to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan. Not that I'm agreeing with Thomas Barrett and his Sysadmin theory, but certainly the problem is well explained.

The nearly unlimited power that infrastructure disruption provides nonstate groups isn't even the most alarming aspect about the new way of war. These groups have developed a new method of organization that leverages the power of global communications networks, provides rapid innovation, and protects them against nation-state counterpressure.

This new way of organizing means no one has been able to develop a strategy for containment or victory over them. You can't kill their leaders, because they don't need them. You can't reliably prevent further attacks, because they're small scale, dispersed, and unpredictable. You can't outmaneuver or outsmart them, because their innovative organization system makes that nearly impossible. Welcome to open-source war.

I think al Qaeda took a beating in 2002 before it figured out how to exploit this phenomena. Robb spends a third of the book describing how these groups take advantage of the modern world's economy, which is why I'm puzzled why he titles this section "how globalization will put an end to globalization." The fourth gen crowd needs globalization to flourish, but it may be that nation-states, in an effort to clamp down on this new style of warfare, will try to cut access to globalization channels through centralized control, pre-emptive attacks, and nation-building - which is absolutely the wrong approach.

"We need to learn to live with the threat they present." That's how Robb closes this book, and it's a challenging concept to understand. By making society more resilient and decentralized, the fourth gen actors become more easily controlled. Robb could have doubled the size of the book to explain this theory better, but he at least stimulates the discussion on how future war will occur. I definitely recommend the read.

Comments

[strategist]

Interesting review. I haven't read Robb's book yet, but I think he is onto something re. "We need to learn to live with the threat they present" by "making society more resilient and decentralized".

I characterize the former comment in a slightly different way - having resilience of mind (stoicism) to cope with terrorist threats in the same way that we cope with weather - floods, storms and the like.

The latter comment is exciting as it suggests a reinvigoration of local communities, local leadership, citizen involvement, and local responsiblity for anything from energy generation to policing/defence and food production.

Thanks for the link in your earlier post. I enjoy reading your blog.

[NVH]

Wow, that's a concept that's going to take some explaining for a lot of people. Most are going to relinquish to the central control. I'm all for the resilience plan, but you have to decentralize first, and you're talking about a national effort to decentralize the power grid and give more control over to the states with the FEDs in support, and it's just all convoluted now. I don't like the idea of "living" with the threat, but rather I do like them "dying" b/c of the threat they represent, why can't we be pre emptive and at the same time make ourselves harder target by decentralizing and becoming more resilient? We already know the extent of the attack capability would be small scale, localized. If we start there, the bigger bio threat stuff could be part of a larger contingency that would be the territory of the federal government and all the changes decentralizing brought about could free up the money to sustain those types of response plans. Hey, is anyone writing this down?

[James]

"Globalization will put an end to globalization" actually makes a lot of sense to me. You might argue that the appropriate response to fourth-generation groups is to improve relationships globally and act in concert to contain them, and you might well be right, but the dismal political reality is the opposite.

Every day in the press you can see "terrorism" and "international crime" cited as excuses for closing borders, restricting immigration, and ending liberal trade agreements. Fear of crime and terrorism will cause people to travel less and be less willing to invest abroad. Already enormous transnational gangs in Central America are using North American drug profits to create precisely the kind of parallel-state entity you describe.

A few years ago the saying went that "politicians worry Mexico will become more like Colombia while policemen worry that Colombia will become more like Mexico." The point was that, as bad as Colombia was, it at least had functioning courts and a reasonably reliable army and police apparatus. The drug-money fuelled corruption that characterizes Northern Mexico is spreading throughout Central and South America and I foresee a waning of legitimate business interests.

Of course, the logical response would be to legalize the drugs and cut the narco-terrorist off from his source of funding but that's another dismal political reality: it just ain't going to happen.

States are becoming weaker, not stronger, and they're becoming weaker because they will no longer recognize their limitations and work within them. They are no longer capable of reforming themselves. They did not recognize that globalization would tend to undermine the authority of territorial-based entities and, once that sinks in, they will use their monopoly of force to limit globalization and thus protect their franchise. States will try to turn the clock back to 1980 and they will use force to do it.

[Sock Puppet of the Great Satan]

"I don't like the idea of "living" with the threat"

Why? There'll always be the risk of a small cell trying something on. What you *can* do is limit the impact of the cell, by disrupting their logistics and training, so instead of dealing with Mohammed Attas we have to deal with Kafeel Ahmeds.

What worries we is what comes after the GWOT.

Think of the parallel with the anarchists of the late 19th century. I think after October 1917, the Russian aristocrats would have happily trade worrying about Bolsheviks for going back to worrying about Narodniks.

[strategist]

"Limiting the impact of the cell" is one of the key ways to fight the networks that Robb talks about. This appeals to me because it has a strong 'indirect' element to it: don't attack the terrorist group, but attack its finances, communications, logistics, support network, and importantly, its ideas.

[dK]

Don't you think that in some ways this model is not really new in some respects? I'm thinking of the powerful drug cartels in Colombia in the 1980s, or even (to a lessor degree) Manuel Noriega in Panama at about the same time. If I think about it, there must be many other examples in contemporaneous history where there existed a Taliban/ al Qaeda-like symbiosis, albeit with different objectives and priorities.

[dK]

Don't you think that in some ways this model is not really new in some respects? I'm thinking of the powerful drug cartels in Colombia in the 1980s, or even (to a lessor degree) Manuel Noriega in Panama at about the same time. If I think about it, there must be many other examples in contemporaneous history where there existed a Taliban/ al Qaeda-like symbiosis, albeit with different objectives and priorities.

[James]

dk: I think the model version of the relationship is that between religious and secular authorities. Always a chancy business, because ultimately the secular authority has all the force. The religious authority can only take the extreme step of delegitimizing the rulers and fomenting rebellion. And if this fails, the religious arm is crushed and permanently subdued.

What is interesting about Rome and Greece is that the religious authorities never really had that kind of influence. In ancient Egypt they seem to; in the Middle Ages the Church could influence events directly.

Of course we are long used to seeing independent militaries around the world setting "red lines" the civilian authorities dare not cross. Another example might be powerful intelligence agencies, but both of these institutions have nothing to gain by weakening the role of the State in society in the same way that a religious authority would.

In my post above I referenced Guatemala, which is currently enduring an election cycle in which drug gangs are flexing their strength, fielding all-but-open candidates and intimidating the police. You might also argue that the KKK had a similar role in the US (not only in the South, as some people believe) during the 1920s.

So I don't think it's new. I don't really think that "Fourth Generation" warfare is really all that new. State warfare was the result of advancements in social organization, cultural identity, and technology that tended to be best exploited by large, central authorities. Cultural identity is fragmenting and technology has been concentrating more and more firepower in smaller and smaller packages ever since 1900.

A different kind of government will emerge from this and it troubles me that the US is caught moving in the wrong direction, concentrating more and more authority at the federal level, and more and more power in the executive branch at that level, at a time when such centralized direction appears to be less and less able to cope with the rise of small, self-directed enemies. It's as if the dinosaur is confronted with the mammal and resolves to make himself larger and more cumbersome in response.