Book Review: Brave New War

A book on war and terrorism doesn’t seem to fit on a site about urban survival. With the exception of a few big notable events, terrorism isn’t a threat most people need to prepare for. However, Brave New War by John Robb examines a new direction in terrorism, away from blood and guts towards system disruption.

Terrorism is generally thought of in the blood and guts variety. When thinking of terrorism, people imagine 9/11, Oklahoma City, The Unabomber and Israel. From a terrorist’s standpoint, this type of blood and guts terrorism loses its effectiveness as it happens more often. In other words, blood and guts terrorism suffers from diminishing returns. Over the past five years, some terrorists groups have moved away from blood and guts terrorism towards systems disruption which becomes more effective as more attacks occur.

In today’s modern world, many of the systems we rely upon are tightly coupled and highly efficient. However, these systems aren’t very robust and are easily disrupted. In a non-terrorist related example, this past week a hospital in Indianapolis had their computer system go down and had to turn away patients. It is from this example that the real risks highlighted in Brave New War are made apparent for those of us not in a high risk area for terrorism, and why a book on warfare and terrorism is important when thinking about urban survival.

Whether it’s food or widgets on the store shelves, nearly everything we purchase is delivered through a just-in-time system. It is the disruption of this just-in-time delivery system that poses the biggest and most likely threat to society. Just-in-time systems rely upon a number of other networks including the transportation system, communications network and the international monetary exchange. A disruption in any one of these systems can lead to a disruption in the delivery of just-in-time goods. This is a cascading system failure, where a failure in one place leads to failures in another. This not only happens between systems, but within a network itself. The Northeast Blackout of 2003 is an example of a small localized disruption in one part of a network spreading throughout a network and affecting a much larger part of the network than the initial disruption should have been able to.

The solution that John Robb has come up with to combat these system disruptions are resilient communities. Resilient communities create “a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses.”

While Brave New War is not a book about survival, it does illuminate a whole host of threats that do face urbanites. When analyzing threats to survival in an urban environment, this is a necessary point to understand, and this book does an excellent job examining these threats and how they have been changing over the past several years and decades.