There is a deep connection in the American psyche between our inception as a frontier nation and our basic freedoms. The early settlers of necessity were self-sufficient and self-reliant. It was only with the closing of the frontier, the increasing complexity of modern life, and the development of our tremendous comfort and wealth that we began to cede more and more responsibility for our well being to the State. Along with such willing surrender of responsibility has been a slow and steady diminution of our freedoms, generally slow enough and modest enough as to be tolerable to most. This is likely to change.
John Robb, author of Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (which should be on your "must read" list) authored a provocative piece in City Journal yesterday that outlines his contention that the Systems Disruption approach to terrorism and crime is likely to continue and accelerate, increasing its lethality and effectiveness. This is due to the nature of our increased vulnerability related to our increased connectivity and, of course, the increased complexity of our civilization. In The Coming Urban Terror, Robb lays out the case that our cities, once looked upon as fortresses of safety from the forces of chaos and disruption have become targets for, as the subtitle puts it, "Systems disruption, networked gangs, and bioweapons."
... in the current evolution of warfare, cities are no longer defensive anchors against armored thrusts ranging through the countryside. They have become the main targets of offensive action themselves. Just as the huge militaries of the early twentieth century were vulnerable to supply and communications disruption, cities are now so heavily dependent on a constant flow of services from various centralized systems that even the simplest attacks on those systems can cause massive disruption.
Most of the networks that we rely on for city life—communications, electricity, transportation, water—are overused, interdependent, and extremely complex.
Extreme complexity in and of itself does not imply vulnerability. However, centralized and extremely complex systems are uniquely vulnerable to system disruption and that is the crux of the problem.
Robb makes a persuasive case for our vulnerability and points out that Iraq is the prototype for large scale system disruption:
Iraq is a petri dish for modern conflict, the Spanish Civil War of our times. It’s the place where small groups are learning to fight modern militaries and modern societies and win. As a result, we can expect to see systems disruption used again and again in modern conflict—certainly against megacities in the developing world, and even against those in the developed West, as we have already seen in London, Madrid, and Moscow.
Robb's crucial point is that the greatest threats will emerge from biotechnology, when a single motivated individual gains the ability to engineer pathogens, much as computer hackers have been able by accident or design, create computer viruses. The time when such biological pathogens, viruses and bacteria, can be so engineered by a single person in a kitchen lab is fast approaching, probably no more than 5-10 years in the future. There should be little doubt that groups like al Qaeda or the Millennialism forces behind Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would have few compunctions about using such weapons, hard to trace and to this point hard to confine and treat.
Between our risks from biotech and the systems disruptions that could destroy our electrical grid, damage our food and water distribution systems, and generally bring chaos to our cities via terrorist and criminal attacks, Robb begins to develop a response:
In almost all cases, cities can defend themselves from their new enemies through effective decentralization. To counter systems disruption, decentralized services—the capability of smaller areas within cities to provide backup services, at least on a temporary basis—could radically diminish the harmful consequences of disconnection from the larger global grid. In New York, this would mean storage or limited production capability of backup electricity, water, and fuel, with easy connections to the delivery grid—at the borough level or even smaller. These backups would then provide a means of restoring central services rapidly after a failure.
An interesting aspect of the technology that Robb discusses is that while our enemies grow more connected and more empowered, our technology potentially affords us the opportunities to become even more connected and empowered. Yet it is unlikely we will do so until we have to; that is the nature of a democracy. As Tom Barnett likes to point out, it is disasters that lead to new rule sets. It will await more serious disasters for Americans, and people of the West, to begin to take back the ability to be self-reliant and self-sufficient. No amount of articles by John Robb or entreaties from the government to keep a two weeks supply of food and water is going to move many people to do so. The lesson of Katrina was that even in the face of a true disaster of epic proportions, the loss of life was so minimal that most people were not moved to abandon their insouciance and prepare for future disasters.
Part of the problem has been the expense of personal disaster preparedness. Installing and maintaining a generator is expensive, requires permits, a fuel supply, etc, and then can not even run your house for more than a few hours. This, however, is changing. New battery back-ups are coming on-line and promise to supply energy for your household for days; eventually some combination of solar power (its efficiency boosted by nanotechnology), battery back-up, fuel cells, and perhaps other as yet undeveloped technologies, will essentially allow us to become independent of the electrical grid. This will not be adopted on a large scale until after the cost comes down and there is a terrible disaster. Most cities, after all, are only ~7-10 days without electricity away from anarchy. A single example of a city falling into disorder, with scores of deaths and chaos, with the "men with guns" establishing their own form of small scale thuggocracy, may be necessary for people to begin to recapture the frontier spirit of self-sufficiency. As with power, our water supply has the potential to become independent of a central distribution center.
Greater than the financial problem is the problem in our national psyche. If you talk to most people about preparing for disaster, keeping a two week supply of food and water, and back-up energy sources, far too many will look at you as if you are one of those far-right survivalists hiding out in the Idaho hills waiting for Y2K to destroy civilization. This mindset must, and will, change. Re-invigorating the frontier mentality of self-sufficiency and self-reliance in our increeasingly connected and complex society will be as inevitable as will be necessary for the worst disasters to be avoided and mitigated.
As far as John Robb's concern that bioterror will be the greatest danger on the next 5-10 years, I think he is right, but Cassandra was also right. Our CDC is a centralized bureaucracy which may have worked well in the days when disease traveled slowly but will be a major hindrance until they fail during an outbreak and a more decentralized model emerges. Just as various companies have become powerful and wealthy by supplying an "immune system" and "anti-virals" to the connected community of computer users, our growing empowerment in the field of biotech will allow small, agile companies to isolate, decrypt (ie, sequence the viral genome), and find treatments for novel biological agents as they emerge. Imagine the cycle of virus identification, protein identification, and anti-retrovirals which took many years to change HIV from a death sentence to a chronic illness, occurring in hours to days, with full cures and preventatives coming on-line with alacrity. The job of the CDC and the government agencies will be to establish conditions under which such companies can most efficiently do their work. In all likelihood, the legal environment will prove to be the biggest force multiplier for the bioterrorists, but one successful bioterror attack with an impaired response due to legal restrictions on biotech companies will be all that will be required to re-write the rule set.
Eventually, we will find ways to decentralize and each citizen will find ways to take greater participation in their own safety. The alternative is for our greater connectivity to become a massive liability and potentially allow for devastating attacks. Unfortunately, major changes in a cultural zeitgeist require the kinds of paradigm shifts that typically only emerge from massive failures of current paradigms.
As a corollary, politicians, Republican and Democratic, who fail to understand how our connectivity increases our danger, and support an enlarged and aggrandized nanny state, (does anyone still think the Department of Homeland Security was a good idea?) all the while supporting policies and laws that make decentralization more problematic, will be the greatest impediment to the necessary awakening of the American public.
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