Thoughts on Brave New War

I just finished reading it today. Some immediate reactions:

• Well-written. Brave New War reads more like an action novel than a ponderous policy book. Robb also writes simply, making the complicated concepts accessible to anyone unfamiliar with terrorism or political violence. The style and presentation is reminiscent of Wired magazine articles.
  

• Robb is to be commended for tying together all of the theorists our corner of the blogosphere follow into a compelling, coherent narrative. He also adds historical context and organization to his global guerrillas concept in way that was impossible with scattered blog posts. Though much of the book's material will be familiar for anyone who reads his blog, Robb uses the book form to contextualize and expand his ideas.
  

For the most part, I enjoyed the book and found its critiques and recommendations well-reasoned and original. I do agree with him (and John Boyd, for that matter) that hierarchal systems, especially closed ones, do tend to amplify the stresses put on them until they collapse or find themselves in paralysis. I have a few disagreements.

Understandably, the idea of global guerrillas is by definition a form of economic determinism--it declares that a group of networked actors succeed by using globalization's structures against itself by causing economic damage. This will play a major part in future war, and will be employed by terrorists. But we should not underestimate the role of moral warfare--which erodes state cohesion through fear, terror, and symbolic violence.

For example, what really triggered the worst of the Iraq violence was the Sunni insurgency's deliberate strategy of targeting Shiites and their holy site. Likewise, genocidal raids against civilian populations, attacks on symbolic targets (like Trade Towers) play a role in giving superempowered actors the power to create confusion and chaos, eroding the moral bonds of the state. One also thinks to the Chinese doctrine of "unrestricted warfare," which aims to destroy the adversary through a variety of nonviolent forms of conflict in addition to more traditional forms of cyberwar trickery and terrorism.

We should remember Thomas Schelling's valuable insights in Arms and Influence about war as "violent bargaining process," how coercive violence plays a symbolic, as well as military, role in communicating different messages between adversaries, and John Boyd's heavy focus on the psychological game of conflict. I'm not saying that conflict is exclusively what Schelling calls "pure violence," but I think that a large part of the impact of violence directed by non-state actors is symbolic. It causes the enemy to massively overreact, scares civilian populations, causes dangerous divisions, shuts down opponents' decision cycles, and coerces.

I'm also not saying that Robb completely ignores this. He does catalog symbolic violence as one of the tools of the global guerrilla. It's just that he considers it a minor one--when there is a huge evidence to the contrary. In Ian Buruma's Occidentalism, he documents how all of the enemies of the West, from Hitler to Osama, have viewed us as a weak and diseased--and proscribed the use of force as symbolism to collapse our moral cohesion.

Also, Robb hints at 5GW and super-empowered individuals by stating at the beginning of the book that "one man will be able to take on the world," but does not develop it. This is an idea that Fred Charles Ikle examines in depth in Annihilation From Within, where he talks about the idea of individuals employing "dual-use" technologies such as nanotech, artificial intelligence and biotech to bring the state to its knees. Something that CFR's Richard Haas also discussed in his lecture was the idea of superempowered individuals using low-tech means to create fear and disruptions. He used as examples the Virginia Tech shooting, the DC snipers, and the anthrax crisis.

These things don't necessarily have to be in opposition to the "global guerrillas" concept. They complement it. Despite the various flaws of the "global guerillas" concept as a whole, I still think the concept is extremely groundbreaking and a base for further study.