Open-source warfare: how do you defend a country against small stateless bands of terrorists?

• Author: Henley, Jim
• Position: Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization - Book review

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, by John Robb, Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 224 pages, $24. 95

AT THE END of Alfred Bester's 1956 science fiction novel The Stars My Destination, protagonist and anti-hero Gully Foyle broadcasts the secret of PyrE to every man, woman, and child on the planet. PyrE, the ultimate "weapon of mass destruction," is compact and unimaginably powerful, and it can be detonated with but a thought. Foyle's government calls him "insane," but he says humanity will survive the knowledge of PyrE if it deserves to: "Let the world make its own choice between life and death. Why should we be saddled with the responsibility?"

In Brave New War, John Robb informs us that Foyle's future is fast approaching. "The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct warfare has finally been breached," Robb writes, "and we are only starting to feel its effects. Over time, perhaps in as little as 20 years, and as the leverage provided by technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination--with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win" (emphasis in original).

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A former Air Force officer and current corporate security consultant, Robb devotes little space to so-called weapons of mass destruction. Chemical and biological arms are just not massively destructive, he argues, and nuclear weapons are much harder for small groups to acquire and use than most terrorism assessments suggest. The weapon of choice that Robb identifies is systems disruption. What Robb calls "global guerrillas"--"super-empowered" bands "riding on the leverage provided by rapid technological improvement and global integration"--are increasingly able to identify the points of failure within vulnerable networks, from power grids to fuel pipelines to communities of trust within a nation-state, and strike them intelligently and inexpensively. The result: cascading failures and damage orders of magnitude greater than the cost of the attack.

Robb's key example: "In the summer of 2004, Iraq's global guerrillas attacked a southern section of the Iraqi oil pipeline infrastructure (Iraq has over 4,300 miles of pipelines). This attack cost the attackers an estimated $2,000 to produce. None of the attackers was caught. The effects of this attack were over $50 million in lost oil exports. The rate of return: 250,000 times the cost of the attack."

According to Robb, global guerrillas practice "open-source warfare" in a marketplace of exceptionally violent ideas. Like Linux programmers or Wikipedia editors, they operate in a decentralized, voluntarist, plugged-in mode, drawing on enthusiasm, experiment, and the exchange of ideas.

From their cradle in post-Saddam Iraq, the methods of open-source warfare have spread to Pakistan, Russia, Nigeria, and beyond. Ever smaller groups can flout the nation-state's monopoly on legitimating force; ever smaller groups can prevent the nation-state from...