http://www.d-n-i.net/lind/lind_5_10_07.htm
This is an article by William Lind who coined the term “4th Generation War”.
What a load of crappenfief. The decentralizing of communications and power helps a nation-state already dedicated to common ideals such as liberty. It reduces inefficiencies in the marketplace because of increased access to information. There was a major blackout in the northeast a while back and civilization didn’t fall because the U.S. and Canada are not populated by ignorant easily-panicked herd-mentality masses, as the author pretentiously implies.
If anything, it’ll gradually undermine the tribalism that supports terrorists because their cultural support will gradually dilute and fade. Or so I’m hoping.
I’d highly recommend Brave New War. Lind has a certain bias toward the ‘Decline of the West’ school, which Robb doesn’t share as much. Robb is much more into systems and Lind is more into culture.
Robb uses the blackout as an example of his thesis. He talked about how the blackout rolled overloading the system and a minor systems failure took out a large section of the whole grid. The blackout is probably the perfect example of systempunkt.
As a counter-example to your argument, I would offer Detroit and New Orleans as fodder for the other side. Look at how things have broken down in those two cities, one due to a natural disaster, the other due to obsolescence of a particular industry’s traditional business model.
Also, think about the definition of “American Corporation” what is that exactly? A corporation that is registered in America? What if their main holdings, workforces and even market are all overseas? Think about Halliburton moving it’s main offices to Dubai.
Wait, guerillas are learning to target vulnerable points in global networks? Really? I haven’t seen any evidence of that. Was 9/11 such an attack?
I don’t think terrorists have really done any sort of infrastructure attacks of the type warned about, despite all the hand-wringing. And it seems to me that these global networks are exactly the sort of thing that CAN’T be destablized by simple attacks. A dictatorship can be disrupted by one bullet. A liberal democracy cannot. A command and control economy can be disrupted by bombing one factory. A market economy cannot. The more complex a global network is, the LESS vulnerable it is. The author imagines that global markets are so vulnerable that one shortage of one critical good will cause the whole thing to spiral out of control as the effect of that shortage multiplies. But that’s exactly the opposite of what really happens. And the funny thing is, the reslience of the global economy is exactly due to “dynamic decentralized resilience” that he says it doesn’t have.
As for the contention that people will start “forming suburban collectives to share the costs of security”, don’t we already have such things? Usually this new form of organization are called “cities” or “counties”, where a geographic area will share the costs of security by hiring “police officers”.
Who exactly are these “global gorillas” (not “guerillas”?) and why do they want to destroy the nation-states and where can I join up?
But that didn’t inflict “massive damage” to the state. It made life inconvenient for a few days for those in the Northeast; the rest of the country muddled merrily along.
Again, where is the damage to the state? It hasn’t collapsed.
But so what? Civilization didn’t collapse, there weren’t riots or mass deaths (or at least none that I recall) or “terror” in any sense that would make it an interesting case study for an actual, y’know, terrorist.
Okay, then why aren’t terrorists destroying dikes or advancing technological progress, if this is something we’re supposed to be concerned about? The major lesson after New Orleans is don’t appoint idiots to FEMA and Detroit is just screwed by shifting economics. That’s an inevitable by-product of capitalism and nothing new.
Heck, if the terrorists really want to destroy the U.S. economy, they should get off their asses and perfect the room-temperature superconductor or the fusion reactor or gum that never loses its flavour or something.
Well, if they’re still incorporated in the U.S., I guess that makes them an American corporation. What’s your point? There are numerous companies registered in Delaware because of tax advantages, even if little-or-no business happens in that state. A corporation is a paper structure and the structure gets built where paper is cheap and plentiful and reasonably close-at-hand. Are you hinting at darker conspiracies or something?
Does everything have to be a Hollywood disaster movie to make an impression?
Most of the examples in the book are in Iraq where systems disruption has been used very effectively.
One of my favorite examples in Iraq was talking about how they were killing and kidnapping employees of catering services that were providing food to American troops forcing American troops to live on MREs for a while. Other examples he uses are attacks on pipelines that cost hundreds of millions in lost revenue for the Iraqi government.
The example of the blackout is an example of systempunkt not an example of the collapse of the state.
No, not darker conspiracies. I am talking about vested interests, and how vested interests are less linked to the fate of individual states than they used to be.
Thing is, both Detroit and New Orleans have been fucked up for a long time. Katrina just exposed New Orlean’s fucked-upedness. Why did the levies fail? Because they weren’t built right? Why weren’t they built right? Because the contractors paid off the inspectors and pocketed the difference. Why didn’t later inspections catch the problem? Corruption. Why did the city devolve into chaos? Because the cops disappeared. Why did the cops disappear? Because they were either taking care of their families, or joining the looting. Why weren’t people evacuated? Because the local government didn’t do it’s job.
Katrina was primarily a local failure. The federal response was pretty piss poor, but if the local government had done it’s job the piss poor federal response wouldn’t have matter so much.
As far as rebuilding New Orleans, the parts that flooded SHOULDN’T be rebuilt. The historic core of the city wasn’t flooded, what flooded were the low-income districts. Why were those districts low-income? Because anybody who could afford anything better lived on higher ground because anybody with sense knew that eventually those areas were going to flood.
The Katrina disaster was not a challenge to state power any more than any other poorly handled disaster in the past 500 years has been a challenge to state power. Sure, a government that muffs a natural disaster creates a lot of cranky people. But this isn’t a new thing, nation-states have always had this feature.
More specifically, do the “global gorillas” want to replace the nation-states with smaller states, or with a world state (please!), or with an anarchic world lacking any states at all? And, in any case, why? None of this is clear from the OP.
Could not one make a case that Iraq was already a collapsed state?
Certainly.
BrainGlutton http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2007/04/hollow_states.html
I’m still not getting the point. In Iraq you have thousands of guerillas attacking infrastructure throughout the country, all the time. That doesn’t really lend much credence to the idea that one attack on infrastructure can shut down the entire system. In Iraq the power grid is attacked all the time yet the country still has a power grid. Is it fucked up, sure? But Iraqis have been living with rolling blackouts for a decade in some areas.
For a similar situation to even begin applying in a non-Iraqi situation you have to have thousands of guerrilla fighters attacking infrastructure targets throughout the United States. If that could even happen then the U.S. would already be so destabilized that its military and security apparatus was castrated, something that wouldn’t exactly be an easy feat for someone to accomplish.
How does your caterer example prove anything? It just shows that the military has secondary sources of food, and got along just fine. Having to eat less tasty food isn’t exactly something that is going to cause the collapse of Western civilization. That’s basically what this author is arguing, that we’re going to see a collapse of states as we know it. And as support of that you bring up an example of people having to eat MREs instead of catered food? I don’t get how that suggests it’d be easy to destroy the state-system.
Plus, soldiers in the field don’t exactly equate to civilian situations. To force regular Americans to stop eating what they’d do guerrillas would have to kill/destroy every super market and restaurant in a huge area.
No.
Merely contaminate the large, mega-sized corporate-owned food distribution centers/warehouses with toxic wastes for industry.
And big corps skimp on anything they can. Like security & manual backups.
Martin Hyde When you fight a war you attack multiple targets hoping that as a unified whole they will diminish your enemy’s ability to fight in the long run to a greater proportion than they will affect yours.
Read the article on Hollow States I posted above. Also think about his example of burbclaves isolating and decentralizing themselves from the whole.
One of the things about this is people are still looking at this from a centralized thinking perspective. What I see from a lot of people is nitpicking at specific examples of systempunkts when it’s not about specific examples but about the overall effect of many of such events. Perhaps I explained the catering thing ineffectively. The *systempunkt *in it was not that it stopped the US military from being able to fight, but that they were able to successfully disrupt an important service by causing the catering company (I believe it was Jordanian) to withdraw and close its contract. Remember that this war relies upon essential services provided by private contractors. The insurgents in Iraq have been attacking private contractors very effectively.
At the same time, the decentralized systems cannot be disrupted in the same way. Their cost of doing business is not raised through systems disruption, while a centralized military’s cost of doing business is. There is no unified Islamist insurgency anywhere in the world.
Here is a link to a bunch of John Robb’s articles that elucidate his point better than the Lind article I linked to in the OP.
In all fairness, John Robb isn’t talking about the end of the state, he is talking about the end of Globalization.
How could you contaminate an entire food distribution center without it becoming obvious to the hundreds of people who work there? You could attack and destroy such a center, but I think it’s all but impossible to poison all the food secretly. And unless you could do that secretly, the food wouldn’t be sent around.
And the thing is, in any given area there isn’t one food distribution center. My uncle’s family owns several supermarket. The regional supermarket franchises (Foodland/SuperValu, Giant Eagle, Kroger) and then the big chains like Wal-Mart and K-Mart all have their own distribution centers. SuperValu for example doesn’t share a distribution center with Giant Eagle, yet you can find both stores in the same neighborhood.
For you average supermarket like Giant Eagle or Kroger, you get in a shipment from the corporate distribution center which usually contains all canned goods, boxed cereals, dry pre-packaged foods (Hamburger Helper type stuff) and et cetera. But dairy products are delivered by a different method, as are bread and meat.
If somehow you destroyed the food source of all the regional distribution centers, all the dairy distribution centers, the bread sources, the meat distribution companies and et cetera you’d still have all the inventory on hand that wasn’t destroyed. People would probably get by fine for the 2-3 days it would take for food to start coming in from the rest of the country.
Wolkenkuckucksheim
If you don’t know means la-la land,
literally in German - Cloud/Cuckoo/Home
Then we’re talking in sheer fantasy. You’re talking about the destabilization of the nation-state system, which requires actual evidence that such a destabilization could take place for a modern, powerful, first world state. Your examples are pointing at Iraq, which isn’t a modern developed nation-state.
In what world is the U.S. going to have so many guerrillas within its borders that they’re attacking our infrastructure at hundreds of points across the country?
I don’t think so. There’s nothing I’ve read so far to suggest any of this stuff has any merit whatsoever. It feels like reading some college students paranoid end-of-days scenario he typed up while on crank.
The original point was:
To me, the very definition of “systempunkt” is undermined by your argument that it isn’t in fact about targeting a single point but by targeting tons of stuff across the country. It undermines the whole concept. If it was really possible to disrupt an entire system just by attacking one key area, maybe you’d have a point. And maybe it IS possible, but we’ve yet to see an example that’s withstood scrutiny. You’re talking about incidents where people are attacking say, oil pipelines THROUGHOUT a country, or multiple caterers THROUGHOUT a country. That’s not analogous to what you were initially talking about. IF we assumed that losing power for a few days would end the Nation-State.
I’m not really sure what you view as “centralized” or “decentralized” the military is divided into many different self-sufficient groupings. Sure, if you destroyed the Pentagon we’d have big trouble with leadership vacuums.
Maybe there is no unified Islamist insurgency anywhere in the world, nor is there any unified Nation-State anywhere in the world that rely on a few key infrastructure points for their existence. There’s ridiculous amounts of redundancy in most systems in America. Destroy a water treatment plant, buy bottled water for awhile. Destroy one company’s food distribution center, there’s still dozens of other companies with their own centers. Destroying one power plant isn’t enough to destroy the electric grid (nor is it very feasible, power plants aren’t exactly skyscrapers, it’s hard to destroy one.)