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| Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization | 
 enlarge | Author: John Robb
Creator: James Fallows
Publisher: Wiley
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 118057
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5 x 0.7
ISBN: 0470261951
Dewey Decimal Number: 327
EAN: 9780470261958
ASIN: 0470261951
Publication Date: April 28, 2008
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Product Description
"For my money, John Robb, a former Air Force officer and tech guru, is the futurists' futurist."
—Slate The counterterrorism expert John Robb reveals how the same technology that has enabled globalization also allows terrorists and criminals to join forces against larger adversaries with relative ease and to carry out small, inexpensive actions—like sabotaging an oil pipeline—that generate a huge return. He shows how combating the shutdown of the world’s oil, high-tech, and financial markets could cost us the thing we’ve come to value the most—worldwide economic and cultural integration—and what we must do now to safeguard against this new method of warfare.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 Order emerges from chaos - ready or not May 14, 2007
59 out of 63 found this review helpful
Since the end of World War II, the world's population has nearly tripled, the Internet has allowed anybody to network with everybody, nuclear weapons have made conventional war obsolete among major powers, and the fall of the Soviet Union has unleashed a witches' brew of armed non-state groups - global guerrillas - that operate in the cracks of the disintegrating state system.
This is just the static picture; the dynamics are even scarier. Global guerrillas practice something Robb calls "open source warfare," which means that in the modern environment, people even on different continents can form or join groups, train, and carry out operations much more quickly than in the past or than the major legacy states can today. As the groups learn from each other (and a sort of Darwinism selects out the unfit), a larger pattern forms, an "emergent intelligence," similar to a marauding colony of army ants, no one of which is very sophisticated, but operating together according to simple rules, they are survivable, adaptable, and in a suitable environment, invincible.
As Robb summarizes it:
... the behavior of these insurgencies as a whole seems to learn, achieve goals, and engage in self-preservation, despite the vast differences in how individual groups are organized. (p. 126)
One could dismiss all of this as speculation except for a couple of facts:
*Much of the software industry and a lot of the Internet (e.g., the Wikipedia) operate using the open source model today
*Nothing else seems to explain the success of the people attacking our forces in Iraq
To construct this model, Robb employs a number of concepts that may be new to people unfamiliar with modern systems theory: close-coupled systems, self-organization, emergent properties (particularly "intelligence"), stigmergy, and the concept of complexity arising from simple processes. He also introduces new tools for understanding how systems work in the modern world: open source insurgency, global virtual states, superempowerment, systempunkts, and "black swans."
These are all powerful ideas and not in the least theoretical as Robb illustrates with events from the evening news. Whether you agree with Robb's end position or his solutions, these are concepts that are needed to describe why today's world is different from that of the Cold War.
As the framework for his solution, Robb proposes a modern version of survivalism. We won't all be holed up in cabins in the woods, a la the Unabomber. But if we are living in a world that is "tightly coupled," where a glitch in the power system in Ohio can cascade into a massive outage involving 50,000,000 people along the entire East Coast, then the solution must involve some loosening.
Robb's general strategy is to improve resilience by any means possible. I could imagine, for example, that instead of building new power plants that, along with their distribution systems, are vulnerable to disruption, the government provides market incentives to improve resilience. The government could increase subsidies to utilities and require all of them to buy electricity from homeowners during the day and sell it at reduced rates at night. As more people add power generation capability to their houses - solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, whatever - resilience improves. This may not be the most efficient solution, but in the age of open source insurgency, too much efficiency can be dangerous.
Robb makes a compelling case that this model will also work for national security. It is certainly working very well for the groups we are fighting.
Whether you agree with his particular solutions is not important. However, the pieces of the problem are real and we are going to have to create ways to deal with open source conflict - an intelligence that emerges through the dynamic interaction of religious fanatics, street gangs, criminal cartels, and at times even other states - or face a series of disruptions that will severely degrade our quality of life.
Brave New Concept April 30, 2007
38 out of 39 found this review helpful
For anyone involved in strategic planning, security, financial markets, energy infrastructure, scenario planning, transportation or communications networking, this book is a must-read. For those of us who follow his work at the GlobalGuerrillas blog, much of the information is familiar, but presented here in book form, the many strands of thought that make up the concept come together effectively.
In short, modern communications technology and complex infrastructure make it much easier for small groups to "hollow out" a state. These groups usually don't want to take over a government, they just want to make the state weak so they can get on with their goals of smuggling, ethnic violence, or other profitable criminal activies. This ability to leverage violence and the inability of most to understand the goals of these groups will loom large in policy circles in the future.
This is the kind of book that sparks a lot of further reading and research, in my opinion. Mr. Robb is taking concepts from war, commerce and communications and making a useful model from them. This concept will be useful for families, corporations and countries.
If you want to understand the concepts that will define debate about war, insurgency, globalization and society in the coming decades, buy a copy of this book. If you are low on cash, skip a few lunches and save up the money. It is worth it.
Comprehending the chaos... May 10, 2007
31 out of 32 found this review helpful
I'm giving 'Brave New War' five stars not because it's engaging and fascinating (which it is), but because it's an important book. The media rarely addresses the dramatic changes now underway in military conflict with anything deeper than good-versus-evil jingoism. But here, Robb explores the drivers that are reshaping global warfare and the decentralized networks (digital and physical) that make this possible. The author provides an entirely new toolset for understanding why the world is changing and why familiar solutions no longer work.
This book does not pull its punches. Some may be upset by its matter-of-fact presentation of guerrilla strategies, but it is precisely this type of honest analysis that's needed if we're going to build a sustainable civilization. If you live in the modern world, then you need to read this book. If you are in command of an army, then you especially need to read this book.
Brave New War May 1, 2007
30 out of 33 found this review helpful
Brave New War by John Robb is a book that was really written for two audiences.
The first is the relatively small number of specialists in military affairs, serious students of geopolitics and bloggers who are already avid readers of Robb's Global Guerillas site. For them, Brave New War is a systematic and footnoted exposition of the theories of conflict and "dangerous ideas" that Robb discusses daily on his blog. They will be entertained and challenged by the same analysis that makes them return again and again to Global Guerillas to debate John Robb and one another.
The second audience is composed of everyone else. Brave New War is simply going to blow them away.
Brave New War is a tightly written, fast-paced work on the emergent nature of warfare, conflict global society with a decidedly dystopian take. In a mixture of original ideas and synthesis of the works of other cutting edge "thought leaders", Robb, a platform designer and former mission commander for USAF Counterterrorism operations, draws analogies from the tech world to explain changes in warfare in the age of globalization. Calling the Iraq War " the modern equivalent of the Spanish Civil War" Robb highlights a robust number of critical concepts in Brave New War that are, in his view, altering international and subnational conflict, including:
Bazaar of Violence
Black Swans
Brittle Security
Dynamc Decentralized Resilience
Emergent Intelligence
Fourth Generation Warfare
Guerilla Entrepreneurs
Global Guerillas
Market-States
Minimalist Platforms
Open-Source Warfare
Plausible Promises
Primary Loyalties
Stigmergic Systems
Superempowered Groups
Systempunkt
The Long Tail of Warfare
Urban Takedowns
Some of these concepts are Robb's, some belong to others and in Brave New War you will find citations for figures as diverse as William Lind, Chris Anderson, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Valdis Krebs, Eric S. Raymond, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Philip Bobbitt, Moises Naim and David A. Deptula. One of the great strengths of Brave New War is Robb's capacity as an analyst and theorist to apply the revelations of research into network theory to warfare, and to conceptualize armed political conflict within the framework of platforms and ecosystems. This gives Robb's arguments a degree of horizontal "interconnectedness" seldom seen in works on military affairs ( except, as Robb himself points out, in the work of his frequent online sparring partner, Thomas Barnett).
Robb is betting heavily on increasing levels of global instability and systemic breakdown as "feedback" from global guerillas overloads "the system" and disrupts globalization. It is this orientation toward discerning the worst-case scenarios and descent into entropy that will raise hackles amongst some readers, though Robb ultimately predicts a strengthening of systemic resilience and a burst of innovation as a result of these tribulations.
Brave New War is the must read book of 2007.
 OK, but not great July 18, 2007
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
Robb's done some excellent analysis on his blog, which I am a frequent visitor. I looked forward to this book in which expands on many of the points previous hit upon in the blog.
He did a good job of describing some of the tactical changes in warfare and how small loosely linked groups are all working towards a common outcome; that of creating an on-going state of chaos which eventually weakens and undermines the state. While his prose is good in this regard, he did not make the case that this is some type of 'Brave New War'. Rather it smells like typical guerrilla warfare with better tools (telecommunications).
Ultimately, it is on this point that the book loses its energy. After putting forth a framework for open source insurgency, Robb takes scenario after scenario and forces his explanation into this narrow framework. In several cases it is apparent he is fitting square pegs into round holes. The book loses some credibility in these cases.
I liked it though, and found it well worth the money. However, Brave New War does not go into the category of grand strategic thinking. Rather, it is a solid look at some of the emerging tactics of what others have called World War IV.
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