It began as an intriguing question. Why, on three occasions, have the world’s superpowers been defeated by small, largely undeveloped, countries? The United States was defeated in Vietnam and has been in its effort to control Iraq. The Russians were defeated in their effort to subdue and control Afghanistan.
I discovered that the United States military has been asking this question ever since the Vietnam defeat. The issue has been studied under the rubric of “asymmetrical warfare.” From what I have been able to discover in an admittedly cursory inquiry the military is relying primarily on technology to address their problems with the kind of guerrilla resistance they have met in Vietnam and Iraq. The consequences of introducing the military and its ever-advancing technology into the environment of the civilian, which is where the terrorist operates, bode ill for mankind. Once the military is introduced into civilian affaires its power can be as easily directed against our own citizens as against any enemy. Unless we are very careful we will wind up letting the military kill democracy under the guise of defending it.
One of the more significant consultants in this area is John Robb who was a mission commander for a counterterrorism unit that worked with Delta Force and Seal Team 6 before becoming the first Internet analyst at Forrester Research and a key architect in the rise of Web logs and RSS. He is writing a book on the logic of terrorism. The following are selections from an article he published in the magazine Fast Company titled “Security: Power to the People.” The full article may be found at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/103/essay-security.html
· The end result of this struggle will be a new, more resilient approach to national security, one built not around the state but around private citizens and companies.
· The terrorists have developed the ability to fight nation-states strategically--without weapons of mass destruction. This new method is called "systems disruption," a simple way of attacking the critical networks (electricity, oil, gas, water, communications, and transportation) that underpin modern life. Such disruptions are designed to erode the target state's legitimacy, to drive it to failure by keeping it from providing the services it must deliver in order to command the allegiance of its citizens.
· Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already. Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life.
· As for those without the means to build their own defense, they will have to make do with the remains of the national system. They will gravitate to America's cities, where they will be subject to ubiquitous surveillance and marginal or nonexistent services. For the poor, there will be no other refuge.
These conflicts could be looked at as technology versus people encounters. As such, why have technologically deficient people been able to defeat the most technologically advanced militaries on the planet? There are those who still argue that the United States lost in Vietnam because it did not bring all its technological capability to that war, meaning nuclear weaponry. The same could be said of Russia. Understanding that nations have always expected their militaries to use all available resources to win a war, it is impressive that in both Vietnam and Afghanistan both the United States and Russia chose defeat rather than employ nuclear weaponry. It raises the question of whether mankind is finally learning, in a very brutal fashion, that wars are no longer winnable. It also indicates the fudamentally evil decision of the Bush administration to bridge this gap between the acceptable and the unacceptable by undertaking the development of battlefield nuclear devices known as bunker busters to, in effect, “domesticate” the use of nuclear energy as just one more battlefield weapon of modern warfare.
There is, however, another aspect of the world as Robb and the military see it. It is a world disintegrating under the pressure of terrorism, to be followed, as that deterioration progresses, by gangs and other smaller groups. I suggest this process would virtually duplicate that which followed the fall of the Roman Empire under pressure from the barbarian invasions. As the security provided by the Roman Empire declined people fled to the estates of local nobility for protection and from this arose the feudal system that dominated Europe for a thousand years. This current scenario by Robb differs in one major regard because of the vastly increased level of technology brought to this disintegrative process. This raises the issue, indeed the specter, of mankind being unable to create an ethos based on its commonality and being backed into a world in which conflict, violence and fear, complemented by nuclear and biological weaponry, dominates. As society fragments under the impact of terrorism, as the powers that be increasingly construe protest as terrorism, as the military increasingly intervenes in domestic protest and as technology is increasingly pitted against individual citizens, it will become progressively clear that those who would build fences dividing humanity invite a world of conflict.
Bob Newhard
