He's been writing about the shift from nation states to market states and uses news from Iraq as a case study/show-and-tell/I-told-you-so-without-the-sarcarm. Most of what he says makes sense, but the broad theoretical underpinnings haven't been that clear to me. (Possibly by design so that I buy his book, but as one of the key early movers in the web logging movement I trust that he's more open than most. And possibly because I'm lazy and haven't read back to the beginning of his site.)
Tonight I started to get a sense of those underpinnings. I was blabbing on and on about the NTSB and how it should stop trying to force airlines to implement their safety measures and instead just tell the public what they're recommending so that a market in safety could develop. (They probably already do so, but in boring white papers... they need to change the format of their information distribution.)
I had tripped onto the notion that to affect change more easily they need to harness the economic force inside each traveler's pocket. By giving out information as a catalyst they could create a new force in the market that would, in the end, make air travel safer... or at least put the definition of that level of safety into the hands of us travelers. It just seemed to me that information distribution would be so much easier than political fighting and enforcement of laws that the airlines are opposed to.
Clearly John Robb is thinking something similar but on a much larger scale... national security instead of airline safety.
His premise is that in a market state the combatants attack high-value targets defined more by market-effect than by traditional military metrics. The terrorists see more value in attacking things like power grids, oil pipelines and telephone lines. Infrastructures. Infrastructures that support markets.
Throughout history dramatic shifts in military protocol have been labeled heretical and terroristic. Napoleon was called a coward for awaking his troops before dawn to attack, the Americans snipers in the revolutionary war were cowards, etc.
John Robb spends a lot of time proving that the terrorists, Global Guerillas as he calls them, are employing these market-based methodologies of attack. I'm sold. My mother is plugged into the military leadership and she's been talking about asynchronous warfare for years now. It makes sense that if you only have 20,000 in your army (al quaeda) and you want to change the world (who doesn't?) you need to come up with some pretty novel approaches. But I'm sure John still has to convince many people and the ability to tie web log entries to stunning war news is certainly not to be missed.
But what I'm interested in seeing is how he makes the argument that information is the way to combat the Global Guerillas. I'm already sold that it's the way to go. I hope that he gives insight into the technological mechanisms we need to deploy. How information reaches the market itself. What feedback loops are needed to make the market efficient. Etc.
I also hope that he delves into the world of economics and uses some prior research to show how more traditional markets like, say, cattle futures are affected by information. Economists have long studied the effects of information on markets and I'm sure that John isn't overlooking this angle.
The general concept, as it seems to me, is that if you create a market for global safety you trust that people, as a whole, want the world to be stable and safe instead of unstable and dangerous. (Probably a good bet but it never seems to work well for the libertarians.) While our current approach focuses on direct destruction of those who disrupt peace, a better approach may be to invest in the creation of a market of world peace and let the world define its own peace level... which would change throughout time... much more fluidly than political policy and military might could ever hope to change.
What I'm missing is the mechanism that puts the Global Guerillas out of business. What is it that makes them stop disrupting peace? Lack of funds? Or do we, the side of the market that wants peace, fund better, smarter mercenaries who destroy the terrorists -- once they become a big enough threat as defined in our marketplace?
And, as always, I may be completely misreading where John Robb's going with his Global Guerillas book, site and concept. It'll be interesting to read the book. I've been subscribed to his RSS feed for a few months now and enjoy his daily analysis of Iraq news from his unique perspective.
Post-Ironman Melancholy