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by Joseph Witt
John Robb writes about the ways technological innovation empowers small groups. His website, http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/, includes discussions of many topics only touched on in his recent book, “Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization,” which was published in 2007. He recently testified before the House Armed Services Committee on the likely effect of global economic crises on terrorism. He spoke to The Portland Alliance in a spare moment before sitting down to dinner with his family in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
JW: One of the most important concepts that you bring up in your book Brave New War, and on your website, is the idea of open-source warfare and the idea that small groups are going to have a lot more advantages, as against large groups, in the next twenty years of warfare...
JR: Well, that's definitely true, that the trends in technology and networking, and the ability of small gro ups to actually conduct warfare is going up exponentially. That's going to change how we approach security.
JW: You've talked about resilient communities as the way people are going to establish security in the future. What's the difference between a resilient community and an everyday community, or a city or town?
JR: Well, you know, the standard configuration of today's society is much more reliant on, or requires a lot of reliance on, the global system to produce food, to produce goods, to provide energy, and those sources of input are increasingly at risk.
The global system is an uncontrolled system and is tending towards instability. In order to gain a large measure of security communities are going to need to produce more of what they consume, in terms of food, in terms of energy, in terms of products, and that would, over the long term, eliminate dependencies that could cause disruption and lost income and loss of stability.
There's going to be plenty of different approaches to this. Local currencies are a way to super-charge local economies, particularly economies that aren't getting sufficient attention or notice by the global economy. It's a way of getting local commerce going when global or national commerce maybe difficult or hard to come by ... the good thing about open-source innovation is the best approaches tend to be shared. People find out about them and they implement them, and they share their results, their experiences.
JW: A key to peace and security is making sure that resources are secure and work is rewarded, people are doing things for each other, they've secured their resources, but you don't talk as much about how smaller groups or communities, resilient communities protect themselves from organized violence. Do you see that as being a very big issue in the next few years, or is that more of a missing the point in that it is more about resource security in the future?
JR: Well, you know, resource security, or the ability to produce and have an economy, is important to be able to afford security. Now without that you're left without the means with which to defend yourself. That's why I see it as sort of the primary thing that has to be bridged before we get to something...
JW: Something else.
JR: ...Something else. Yeah, but I definitely think that small communities can effectively defend themselves against organized violence, particularly violence in a — from gangs.
JW: Well, I'm thinking here of what's happening in Mexico and the Southwest United States, which you've discussed on your website .
JR: Yep.
JW: What's the difference between a group of people who like football and the more intense relationship that comes with being in a tribe?
JR: Tribalism is the organizational cockroach of human history. We've lived 99.9% of our lives as human beings inside the tribal structure. It's only recently that we've moved beyond that, that we've moved beyond that, or moved to something else.
I wouldn't even necessarily say we've moved necessarily beyond it. A lot of the tribal layer of organization has been eliminated by the nation-state, which saw it as a competitor, and the marketplace, which saw it as an impediment. So in developed countries there isn't this kind of community-tightness that could help, kind of, help withstand large system-shocks. What we need to do, in order to withstand an increasingly unstable global system is to build community.
I bring up tribal organization because it has... almost a formula for success, in terms of creating a kind of fictive kinship that ties people together and helps them become mutually reliant. I'm not talking communal goods, or anything like that, because there is private property within tribal structures, and entrepreneurialism and the like, but there is a sense of mutual reliance, it's reciprocal, that the loyalty you give to the tribe is given [back] to you. And we see that – that would be something that is definitely beneficial if times get tough.
If there isn't enough food, or their energy supplies get disrupted, or there is mass unemployment, you know, who's going to help you get a job? Who's going to make sure your family is fed, if you're falling short? And right now there's a pretty big chasm between you and the government, the national government, and the the extent that you can rely upon them to help get through it.
JW: You talk a little about the emergence of these different ways of being violent, but violent crime overall has been on the decline for a while now.
JR: Yeah, most definitely.
JW: Do you see that reversing, or is that measuring something different, or —
JR: Well, yeah, it's already reversing. Just here, in the local area in Lawrence, Massachusetts, there's a 50 percent uptick in property crime, not murder yet, because that has to do with mostly relatives, people you know, but a radical uptick in property crime. The declining economy is a pretty good indicator.
JW: I heard that 400 banks were robbed in New York City last year.
JR: Yeah, bank crime, I mean bank theft is way up. The property crime is an early indicator, and then as [criminal] groups form, they become bolder, they have turf battles between each other if there is not enough government presence. If there is enough government presence – in the modern environment, these groups tend to band together and take on the government itself. That's what's happening in Mexico, that's what happened in Iraq.
JW: A couple of more quick questions and I'll wrap it up, let you get back to your dinner. Iraq is an interesting example, because we had the so-called “Surge” strategy, and what I've understood is that the key to that strategy was buying off a lot of local gangs, or buying off some local tribal groups.
JR: Well, yeah. I wrote an article back in 2005 for the New York Times. Did you happen to read it? I linked to it on my site.
JW: I haven't looked at that.
JR: It's a really short one. It's called “Open-Source War,” it's a New York Times op-ed, and it basically said that we're facing an open-source insurgency that includes lots and lots of small groups, and it doesn't look like there's any fractures in the insurgency right now. The U.S. Strategy should be probably similar to what IBM did when it approached open-source software development, in that it embraced it. Sign-up militias, and turn guerrillas into militias. Now that's exactly what we did two years later and it worked.
JW: Yeah, it worked really well.
JR: (laughs) Yeah, it depends on what you consider “well,” you know...
JW: Much better than I thought it would, I guess I mean.
JR: Well, that's what a lot of people think, but the problem is they were just looking at the top-line violence. The problem is that it didn't reconstruct Iraq.
What it did is it put together militias that are only nominally – not even only nominally, they're actually openly hostile to the government – armed them and gave them control over their own territory. It didn't make Iraq a stronger state, it made it much weaker. Long term, what happens with these militias, they tend to get heavily into crime, transnational crime, and become as big a problem as the guerrillas themselves were in the first place. And that's been the experience in Columbia, El Salvador, and other places.
JW: Let's return for a moment to your discussion of peace. When you talk about Resilient Communities, that is different from stocking up on canned foods, going up into the hills with a gun, and hiding out until the worst is over, or something, the kind of attitude that you see on the survivalist right.
JR: That's a pretty interesting strategy if the disruptions only last, you know, a couple of weeks. It doesn't help you long term if there is a protracted downturn, say a global depression that lasts several years.
JW: Or if its a slow-motion falling apart that takes more than a year.
JR: Yeah something that lasts decades, potentially. Like when Russia collapsed economically, and there are a lot of parallels between what happened in Russia and what's going to happen here, potentially. Not good ones, but if you went up into the woods with canned goods you last maybe ten months at a stretch. Eventually you'd have to come back down.
In Russia, the people who survived ended up adapting, creating resilience, building the kinds of things I 'm talking about. Of course, they had less of a means to begin with.
JW: One more quick question. What sort of things should we do to build resilience into our community here, what would you recommend?
JR: Well, local agriculture. Subscription farming. Small rented plots, I mean, like lawn-entrepreneurs. You've heard of those guys?
JW: We do have at least one group that does that here, where they come to your house and grow food on your lawn [Your Backyard Farmer, http://www.yourbackyardfarmer.com/].
JR: Yeah. And you know micro grids? A micro grid, its something to look up, because it will take too long to explain, but basically it's a community electricity network that's built using the existing electricity infrastructure. Its allows, if you add intelligence to it, it can be two-ways ... it will take some cooperation from the power companies, but it's definitely doable.
Supporting community power systems, or community geothermal groups, you know, organizing them along the lines of community fire departments, you know basically a drilling rig, and go around and drill holes for people who are willing to participate in drilling holes for others.
Because that's the most expensive part of geothermal, and given that half the energy we consume in the U.S. is for heating structures, you can go a long ways if you use geothermal to do that.
JW: It's cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
JR: Yeah, basically. You can cut your energy bills by up to two thirds. But I've got lots of stuff on the site.
Joseph Witt is an Alliance volunteer. For more from John Robb, see www.globalguerrillas.typepad.com.
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