I highly recommend it. He talks a great deal about how the new networks that are forming are far more nimble than the state, and how the lack of Total War between states due to Nuclear weapons has diminished the power and relevance of the state. His examples go from Corporate action such as Blackwater protecting corporate interests in Katrina ravaged New Orleans, and Wal Mart using it’s supply chain to deliver relief supplies more quickly than FEMA was able to act, to the insurgency in Iraq, which was largely devised under Saddam as a response to Gulf War I. His experience as a counter-terrorism analyst and a software entrepeneur give him a very interesting perspective on the subject. The United States Military with its relaxed standards for enlistment have been training American gangbangers in counterinsurgency, and conversely insurgency. A guy I met coming back from Iraq talked about how strange it was to see MS13 (Mara Salvatrucha) graffiti on the walls of Baghdad.
I definitely recommend the book, but the articles above should give you a good idea of the thrust of his thesis.
Don’t have much time nowadays, but overall I have to say that even Patton was reported to use his own wealth and the Sears Catalog to get needed supplies to his troops. Related to El Salvador, the ones that think of open source warfare are only partially correct: sure it would be effective to outsource the counterinsurgency effort, but IIRC this is what has been going on in Iraq already, and in El Salvador that lead to a final step: to get the UN to organize a peace accord.
The problem is that the current administration is acting like even taking this last step in Iraq is to admit defeat, and that is leading me to approve impeachment proceedings against this sorry bunch.
But I also have to remark once again on one of my rules:
If something important is happening in the world, a Salvadorian is involved, for good or for evil.
Regards.
Wanna give some examples of some Salvadorians and their involvement in important things? I’m intrigued.
Reading Robb didn’t really convince me of anything, but it helped solidify facts for things that I already sort of suspected.
One of the most interesting things he talks about are macro group intelligences. He talks about how with the leader of a guerrilla organization is superflous after a group intelligence has formed, even without individual cells knowing each other.
Whether it’s The Harriman group selling parts for oil refineries in Post Bolshevik Russia, or Iran-Contra, I think we are going to see an increase in conflicts of interest between large corporations and the US government. Some of our own corporations will oftentimes be adversarial.
A point he makes is that there is too much profit to be made through utilization of the guerrilla networks, so he expects funding to increase not decrease. He makes a claim that I haven’t verified, and to be honest I wouldn’t know how to verify to any real satisfaction, that the black market is about 3 trillion per year and growing 7 times faster than the white market economy.
What he described as the future for America looked a lot like the Burbclaves in Snow Crash.
I think that the significance of decentralized hierarchies is a huge one for the entire world system, as we now have value territories that are entirely abstract, and may therefore be contested from opposite ends of the globe. What I’m just waiting for is to see some of these non-state groups going to war with one another. I think we are seeing that to a degree with the fact that Halliburton has become synonymous with the military industrial complex.