Rebecca Walberg

One of the challenges facing military thinkers in the 21st century has been how to adapt the model of warfighting that has been developed over the past four centuries to a world in which the biggest threats come from groups that aren’t armies, don’t control a specific territory, and owe allegiance to no nation or government. John Robb, a blogger, ex Special Forces soldier, and businessman, has written a thought-provoking book on this subject, which I review for Canadian webzine C2C here.

Introduction:

The diabolical genius of the 9/11 attacks was the way in which a small and loosely organized group of terrorists slipped around the behemoth of the US military and security apparatus, rather than attempting to directly engage it. The greatest threat to American domestic security and the American military abroad turned out to be not another nation or its armed forces, but a determined consortium using only tools that can be cheaply and easily purchased, such as cell phones and box cutters.

John Robb, a technology consultant with an engineering degree from the Air Force Academy, a business degree from Yale, and years of experience in counterterrorism as a special forces operative, sees a parallel here with the decline of Microsoft. For years, that company was the unquestioned leader in computer software, with competitors such as Novell, Corel and Netscape, which quickly lost out whenever they tried to compete with Microsoft head-on. Instead, the most serious challenger to Windows comes from Linux, an open source operating system which is freely distributed, and improved upon by its users. Robb believes that the future of organized violence will be similar: the age of the colossus is past, while agile, adaptable and only loosely hierarchical organizations will dominate from now on.