globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas -> globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/
Global Guerrillas Networked organizations, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging marketplace of violence. An open notebook on the epochal war of the 21st Century.
GLOBAL GUERRILLA SWARMING 02/17/2005 JOURNAL: The Great Game A great game worth tens of billions of dollars in profits is now in motio n ("a Soros moment" in hedge fund parlance). The key to the pay-off: p redict when, where, and how global guerrillas will strike next. The game is derived from the lesson of Iraq: that a small disruption effo rt by a handful of guerrillas can radically move global oil prices. Est imates of its sustained impact are as high as $15-20 a barrel due to a l ack of excess capacity in the system to make up for the short-fall from Iraq. All it takes is insight into how global guerrillas operate...
TrackBack 02/16/2005 SMALL GROUPS AND GLOBAL WARFARE The decline of the nation-state is seen in a graph of the ability of smal l groups to replicate the state's most vital commodity -- large scale vi olence.
Rapid technology improvement and global information transfer (part of a larger context of interconnec tivity) has produced a spike in the ability of small groups to produce m ass casualties (see attached graph). Loose Nukes, Biological weapons, and Traditional Terrorism Armed with weapons of mass destruction, this conclusion is certainly true .
The lower technical hurdles of biological and chem ical weapons represent more of a threat. Regardless, the current comple xity of these weapons implies that their use will be relatively infreque nt. The rapid technologi cal improvements underway in the biological sciences will eventually low er barriers to entry and thereby increase the potential of use. Frequency of Large Scale Attacks In the short to medium term, even with the availability of chemical and b iological weapons, we can expect large mass casualty events to be relati vely rare.
They found, from the analysis of data from 36 years of terrorist attacks, that casualtie s per terrorist attack follow a power law (scale free). The distribution of attacks shows that most terrorist attacks generate fe w casualties and only rarely do attacks produce large numbers of casualt ies. This analysis demonstrates the difficultly terrorism has generatin g large casualty events. In fact, their analysis indicates that an even t larger than 9/11 is only likely in the next 7 years. This may seem ho rrible, but as a challenge to nation-state military power, this falls we ll short of a transformative capability. System Disruption and the Democratization of Violence If we look at different metrics of violence, such as the economic costs o f system disruption, the picture changes dramatically. Unlike tradition al terrorism, system disruption doesn't focus on casualties but rather o n the dislocation of infrastructures and markets. The effectiveness of these attacks are measured in the financial damage it causes the target economies.
Attack_severity_1 Analysis indicates that the results of attacks that cause system disruption do not follow a power law but rather a linear f unction. This makes the method much more suitable for sustained warfare against nation-state targets. Attacks can be planned with a relatively high degree of confidence in the results. Additionally, the results ar e sufficient to provide substantial returns on the invested effort and c apital (direct losses to Iraq due to systems attacks are over $7 billion , to the world economy the damage is in the hundreds of billions due to the influence of the attacks on the supply of oil to global markets). T he reasons for this superior performance include: * The barriers to systems disruption are de minimus. Specialized knowledge helps, but it isn't necessary to accomplish an attack with a substantial impact. As a result, attacks against systems can be easily replicated over time -- for example, routine attacks on gas and oil pipelines that connect to the Iraqi refinery/power plant complex in Baiji usually result in $50 million + in damage per attack. In contrast to traditional terrorism, systems attacks do not suffer diminishing returns. The quantity of damage routinely generated by systems disruption far exce eds the pay-off of traditional terrorism (the area under the curves). T his technique is therefore a viable method of warfare that can challenge nation-state military power today.
TrackBack 02/04/2005 JOURNAL: Pakistan's Descent Pakistan is facing a global guerrilla insurgency (modelled on the most ef fective parts of the Iraqi insurgency). Baloch tribesmen have begun a c ampaign of systems sabotage in an effort to gain coercive leverage with Pakistan's government.
NOTE: A $4 billion proposed Iran-Pakistan-India natural gas pipeline sys tem is now in jeapardy. Much of it would have passed through the provin ce (however, given the national reach of these guerrillas, it wouldn't m atter where in the country it was located). Pakistan planned to gain up to $500 m a year in fees from this venture. If this is resolved in the short term, an d the pipeline is put into place, disruption would have a major impact o n India's economy.
TrackBack 02/02/2005 SCENARIO: CHECHEN INDEPENDENCE (Part 2) Vladimir Putin: "The fuel and energy sector, overall, is the goose that l ays the golden egg. Killing the goose would be insane, stupid and unacce ptable."
systems sabotage) might be used in the relatively simple test c ase: the disruption of energy exports to coerce the Russian state. Most western economies are more complex and therefore wouldn't be as vulnera ble to attacks on a single set of systems.
Even though this confl ict started as a classical war of national independence, it will likely end as another major engagement in our epochal war against global guerri llas. The Moral Objective To win, the Chechens need to win a decisive moral victory. The moral cen ter of a nation encapsulates its will to fight.
The adv ent of a world dominated by global markets has changed this equation. Nation's are no longer self-sufficient, they are interdependent and incre asingly reliant on their ongoing ability to perform in global markets. Fall behind in this competition and currencies's collapse, debt becomes exorbitant, and domestic stock markets plummet. A sharp slap of Adam Sm ith's invisible hand can quickly turn a weak state into an economic bask et case. As a result, the target for a moral victory doesn't rest withi n the nation-state, but rather with the markets it competes in. It can radically impact market psychology by building uncertainty (kryp tonite for markets), menace to contracted export flows (resources in thi s case -- 1/3 of Europe's natural gas comes from Russia), and mistrust ( a flight to alternative suppliers and investment opportunities). If Russia can be put to the edge of financial catastrophe due to a moral victory won in global markets, the achievement of the limited objective of Chechen independence is easily possible.
The ongoing strength of the Rus sian economy today, and in the future, is its energy industry. It is th eir strongest connection to global markets and the source of the funding that allows the government the flexibility it needs to take unilateral action.
systempunkts (how this would be accomplished i s the subject of the Chechen Independence Part 3). Indirection and the Horns of a Dilemma A major benefit of the decentralized bazaar approach to global guerrilla insurgency, is that it naturally puts their adversaries on the horns of a dilemma. Simply put, this is a situation when an adversary is forced to defend alternative objectives with insufficient resources to defend t hem all. With multiple groups probing the target state for weakness (Ir aq has more than 60 autonomous groups), all critical targets are simulta neously vulnerable. How the media cover "terrorism" can also provide support for global guerr illas. Direct assaults on the target population (traditional terrorism like that of the Chechen Black Widows) get the greatest coverage. It do minates the headlines and therefore will evoke the greatest defensive re sponse from the target state. Attacks on infrastructure get much less ...
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