Print
War in the Age of Terror
A review of John Robb’s Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization
John Wiley & Sons, 2008
210 pp, $15.99
The diabolical genius of the 9/11 attacks was the way in which a small and loosely organized group of terrorists slipped around the behemoth of the US military and security apparatus, rather than attempting to directly engage it. The greatest threat to American domestic security and the American military abroad turned out to be not another nation or its armed forces, but a determined consortium using only tools that can be cheaply and easily purchased, such as cell phones and box cutters.
John Robb, a technology consultant with an engineering degree from the Air Force Academy, a business degree from Yale, and years of experience in counterterrorism as a special forces operative, sees a parallel here with the decline of Microsoft. For years, that company was the unquestioned leader in computer software, with competitors such as Novell, Corel and Netscape, which quickly lost out whenever they tried to compete with Microsoft head-on. Instead, the most serious challenger to Windows comes from Linux, an open source operating system which is freely distributed, and improved upon by its users. Robb believes that the future of organized violence will be similar: the age of the colossus is past, while agile, adaptable and only loosely hierarchical organizations will dominate from now on.
It’s a case that he makes well. Robb’s firsthand familiarity with both counterterrorism and the business world leads him to find fascinating similarities between the two. For example, consider the concept of “the long tail.” The phrase originally describes the rise of the niche market, especially in publishing, but it applies equally to guerillas and counterinsurgents. Using Iraq as an example, which he does throughout Brave New War, Robb makes the parallels clear. Just as printing on demand allows writers to earn (modest) returns on obscure publications, the “low cost” of entry to terrorism (with the supplies and expertise needed for explosives costing only a few hundred dollars) makes it easier for increasingly small groups to cause significant disruptions.
Technology has made radical changes in how strangers connect and communicate. Relatively small groups of TV show fans have used the internet to link up and lobby against series cancellations, where a decade earlier they would have been without a voice. In a malignant use of the same techniques, a dozen malcontents anywhere in the world can now find each other and coordinate their actions against the target of their choice in a manner that would have been unimaginable before the ubiquity of internet and cell phone access.
The relationship between organized force and the market has other aspects that Robb explores. The rise of private security companies, a.k.a. – mercenaries, has been given a relatively high profile by the presence of Blackwater and similar groups in Iraq, where (at the time Brave New War was written) 100,000 civilians operated in support of 130,000 US armed forces personnel. Contractors now provide not only routine services for the military such as laundry, cooking and maintenance of vehicles, but most controversially, security and bodyguard services. Robb views this reliance on mercenaries as a sign of the general weakening of the state, which has historically been defined by its monopoly on force. Signs of this shift predate Iraq, though, as he makes clear in an assessment of the increasing numbers of American communities and individuals that rely upon private security to defend their property and physical safety.
On the fringes of private police forces and military contractors are paramilitary groups that operate roughly in parallel with the state, but without its official sanction. One example is Colombia’s United Self-Defense Force (AUC), an armed group operating against FARC, which serves the government’s greater interests and which turns a blind eye towards its sporadic forays into the drug trade. Less sinister but closer to home are the American Minutemen in the southwest, whom Robb describes as a paramilitary force working in concert with the Border Patrol.
All these trends – the entrepreneurial nature of guerilla violence, the reliance upon private companies for security and defense needs, and the continued operation of paramilitaries – are, Robb believes, part of a greater and profound shift that is now taking place, after which we will live in a post-national world. Like highly trained soldiers the world over, Robb has studied military history and the great strategists, and sees current events as part of a pattern dating back to the 17th century and the Thirty Years’ War.
Fought in central and western Europe, the war was triggered by religious conflict, and drew in fiefdoms, principalities, and small kingdoms from across the continent. Bloodshed and general barbarity reached then unprecedented levels, and the costs, both human and economic, of this long and intense war effectively put small states out of business. When the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648, only large kingdoms had the resources to fight modern wars, and it is to this date that the birth of the modern state system is often traced. From that date until the 20th century, wars served to enhance the strength of the state and the level of control sought by the government over all spheres.
It is this process, begun in the mid 17th century and continuing for more than three centuries, that Robb sees unraveling in Iraq and around the world. Now, the massive infrastructure of military power is a weakness, reacting slowly and inefficiently to guerilla attacks; and the sophisticated and regulated economies of Western states are an Achilles heel, since a small breakdown, whether an explosion at an oil pipeline or a failure in a power grid, can cascade throughout an entire system. Strong central government is a liability, moving lethargically through bureaucratic channels to counter threats that are mercurial. When wars are best fought by non-state actors, Robb suggests, the nation-state is no longer relevant.
In this sense, Brave New War popularizes a thesis that is actually not that new, and first laid out in Martin van Creveld’s The Transformation of War. In this seminal book, published in 1991, van Creveld demonstrated that since 1945, Western armies have tended to fight in low intensity conflicts (LIC), for which they are poorly prepared and which they therefore often lose. Examples abound, including France in Algeria, the U.S. in Vietnam, and, he suggests in more recent works, the Americans in Iraq. Organized violence is still with us, but the nation state has stagnated, being routinely confounded and occasionally even defeated by non-state actors. Those who would understand and master warfare today must, therefore, come to terms with the oncoming obsolescence of the nation state and its implications for geopolitics and diplomacy.
These latter two fields are scarcely addressed in Brave New War. Robb skates across the surface of highly influential theories and philosophies, without engaging them in depth. In a fairly brief book meant to be widely accessible, and not aimed only at armchair generals, this is not a major shortcoming. While Robb includes a number of his influences in his recommended further readings, he rarely acknowledges the debt he owes to these earlier writers in the body of the book. A greater flaw is his failure to look at the broader implications of his own assertions.
Early in the book, for instance, Robb asserts that the day is coming soon when we will see the “ability of one man to declare war on the world and win.” Is Robb truly suggesting that a single individual could bring about an apocalyptic crisis? If he means to point out that one charismatic man with limited resources can create havoc and destruction, he is correct, but this is scarcely a new observation. If he means something more, why does he not expand on it? In this first chapter, and again throughout the book, Robb shows how it is ever easier for ever smaller groups to fight wars, but this does not support the rather extreme assertion quoted above. Such flippant fatalism adds nothing to the book’s content and diminishes Robb’s arguments.
Brave New World’s prescriptions for coping with organized violence as nations wane are provocative. Robb strongly disapproves of strengthened centralized government in the face of terrorist challenges. He cites Homeland Security specifically as a counterproductive effort that could lead to a “knee-jerk police state.” He sees this mindset as a contributor to 9/11, in that massive and entrenched intelligence bureaucracies thought in lockstep with each other and were so incapable of quick adaptation that they unwittingly enabled the coming terrorist attacks by missing the warning signs. Even less intrusive central responses to terror are unhelpful, he convincingly argues, in that they are brittle, easily damaged and slow to rebuild. More autonomous, decentralized border security is the response he recommends, so that security forces can adapt to local circumstances, rather than forcing every situation in the same mold.
Nation-building and preemptive war also run afoul of Robb’s guidelines. The complexity and chaos of such actions is so great, he believes, and our ability to predict likely outcomes so erratic, that the costs will always be higher than the benefits. Further, the worst aspects of nationalism will inevitably disrupt post-national attempts to stabilize and democratize other countries. This has occurred in Iraq, for instance, where the Kurds, and other groups wishing to govern their own state, do not always have interests that align with those of the United States.
The useful solutions, according to Robb, are in increased decentralization and resilience. The same degree of interconnectedness and relative lack of hierarchy that enabled Al Qaeda, whose name means “network,” can be applied to defend against systems disruption. Rather than having power generated at a relatively small number of power stations as is currently the case, he suggests a much greater quantity of smaller generators to supplement existing infrastructure, including solar panels at a household level, so that even coordinated attacks on the power grid would not disrupt the flow of electricity at the national level. Distributing the functions both of government and industry, so no single strike can cause widespread damage, is a strategy that he advocates applying wherever possible.
Here too, though, Robb doesn’t look at the repercussions of his suggestions. Installing solar panels and a network connecting them at each home is a costly proposition. Should each household buy its own hardware, on the understanding that they are making themselves safer, and if so, what proportion of the American public is likely to act on this? Is this a project to be organized and funded by the state, and if so, where will the resources come from, and is this not exactly the kind of top-down diktat that Robb considers obsolete?
Decentralized businesses and government may well be more resilient, but they will also be more expensive, losing economies of scale and introducing more duplication of services when multiple regional offices replace one central headquarters. These costs may be manageable, or indeed unavoidable, but they must be accounted for when plans to make the developed world hardier and more flexible are advanced.
Brave New World is a quick read, written from an unusual perspective: books about terrorism and security are continuously released, as are discussions of the latest business trends, but Robb manages to combine the best of both genres while making insightful comparisons between the two fields. The solutions he advances have flaws and are not fully fleshed out, but his explanations of the problems involved, and the challenges the West will continue to face when dealing with terrorism and non-state actors, bring something new to the discussion.
