Michael: Kevin, what do you think is a spectacular, once-in-a-lifetime return on investment for a business? Kevin: Wow, okay. I mean, if you're a venture capitalist, maybe 100x your money? If you're a complete genius who bought Bitcoin in 2010, maybe a thousand-to-one? Michael: How about a million-to-one? Kevin: Come on, that's not real. That's lottery ticket math. Michael: It is real, and it's terrifyingly real. The 9/11 attacks cost al-Qaeda about half a million dollars to plan and execute. The economic damage to the United States? The Royal Institute of International Affairs estimated it at a minimum of half a trillion dollars. That is a one-million-to-one ROI. Kevin: Oh man. When you put it like that... it's not just an attack, it's a business model. A horrifyingly effective one. Michael: That is the exact premise behind a book that was disturbingly ahead of its time: Brave New War by John Robb. It was published back in 2007, but it reads like a blueprint for the last fifteen years of global conflict. Kevin: John Robb. I'm not familiar with the name. What's his background that he could see this coming? Michael: And that’s what makes his perspective so powerful. He’s not a typical academic or a think-tank analyst. Robb is a graduate of the Air Force Academy, a former special operations officer who flew missions, and then he went to Yale and became a successful tech entrepreneur and security analyst. Kevin: Hold on, so he's seen war from the inside, and he's seen the tech world from the inside? Michael: Precisely. He understands both the logic of military strategy and the logic of network effects and open-source systems. He saw this collision of technology and warfare coming from both sides, and he argues it has created an entirely new kind of enemy.

Kevin: A new kind of enemy? I feel like we've been talking about "new" terrorism since 9/11. What makes Robb's idea different? Michael: He calls them "Global Guerrillas." And the key difference is in their motivation and organization. We tend to think of terrorists as purely driven by a rigid ideology. Robb says to think of them more like "guerrilla entrepreneurs." Kevin: Guerrilla entrepreneurs? That sounds like a marketing agency's edgy self-description, not a global threat. What does that even mean? Michael: It means they operate less like a traditional, top-down army and more like a decentralized, open-source project or a dark Silicon Valley startup. They aren't always trying to seize control of the state in the classic sense. Often, they just want to break it, to create chaos where their illicit businesses can thrive. They commodify conflict. Kevin: Okay, that’s a big idea. I need a concrete example. Where have we seen this in action? Michael: The most potent example, which happened years after Robb wrote the book, is the rise of ISIS. Think about how they operated. They didn't just have fighters; they had a global, online marketing and recruitment division that was second to none. They used slickly produced videos on YouTube and targeted social media campaigns on Twitter to draw in tens of thousands of foreign fighters. Kevin: Right, I remember that. It was shocking how effective their propaganda was. So they were basically a distributed, remote-first company from hell? Using Twitter for HR and YouTube for marketing? Michael: That's a perfect way to put it. And it goes deeper. They were masters of what Robb calls "open-source warfare." They didn't invent every tactic themselves. They learned from other groups online, adapted IED designs from forums, and shared their own innovations back into the ecosystem. It was a collaborative, networked approach to violence. Kevin: A bazaar of violence, as the book calls it. And what about funding? A traditional army needs a state to pay its bills. Michael: Exactly. But a global guerrilla network doesn't. ISIS funded itself through a portfolio of criminal enterprises: smuggling oil, kidnapping for ransom, trafficking artifacts, and taxation in the territory it controlled. They blurred the lines between a political insurgency, a criminal cartel, and a proto-state. They were agile, adaptable, and incredibly difficult to fight with a conventional army. Kevin: I can see that. But critics might say, well, they were eventually defeated, territorially at least. Doesn't that prove the model is flawed? Michael: It proves their attempt to hold territory like a traditional state was flawed. But Robb's point is that the network itself, the idea of ISIS, is far more resilient. It has since metastasized into affiliates across Africa and Asia. The brand and the open-source tactics live on. They caused years of chaos, destabilized a region, and drew superpowers into a costly quagmire, all core goals of this new warfare. They proved the model works. Kevin: Okay, so we have these new, networked 'guerrilla entrepreneurs.' But I still come back to the same question. They can't win a head-to-head battle with the US military. So how do they actually project power? How do they fight? Michael: That's the million-dollar, or rather, trillion-dollar question. They don't fight head-to-head. They change the game entirely. They don't attack the army; they attack the system that supports the entire society. This is the second, and perhaps most chilling, of Robb's core ideas: Systems Disruption.

Kevin: Systems Disruption. That sounds abstract. Break it down for me. Michael: It’s brutally simple in its logic. A modern, globalized society is like a finely tuned machine. It depends on countless interconnected systems to function: the power grid, oil and gas pipelines, shipping lanes, financial markets, the internet. These systems are built for efficiency, not for resilience. They are our greatest strength and our most profound vulnerability. Kevin: And the global guerrillas know this. Michael: They know it's where the leverage is. Why spend millions trying to blow up a tank, which will be quickly replaced, when you can achieve a thousand times more damage by attacking a single, unprotected node in one of these systems? Robb gives a perfect, real-world example from Iraq. Kevin: Let's hear it. Michael: In post-invasion Iraq, a small team of insurgents wanted to disrupt the country's main source of income: oil exports. They didn't launch a massive assault on the oil fields. Instead, they found a vulnerable, unguarded section of a pipeline in the desert. They planted a relatively small, cheap explosive. The explosion ruptured the pipe. Kevin: Okay, so a pipeline is broken. They can fix that, right? Michael: They can, but think of the cascading effects. The immediate result was a massive oil spill. The flow of oil to the export terminals stopped. It took a repair crew nearly a week to fix it, slowed by the heat and the constant threat of being attacked. For that week, Iraq's oil revenue dropped to near zero. The direct cost to the Iraqi economy was over $500 million. Kevin: Hold on. For the cost of a used car, maybe a few thousand dollars in explosives, they inflicted half a billion dollars in damage? That math is terrifying. Michael: It gets worse. The attack, and others like it, created uncertainty in the global oil market. Traders added what they called a "terror premium" to the price of every barrel of oil, which Robb says was about $8 at the time. That premium cost the global economy an extra $640 million a day. That's the power of systems disruption. It's not about the body count; it's about imposing a crippling "terrorism tax" on your enemy. Kevin: A terrorism tax. I like that term. It's like how the constant threat of ransomware attacks forces every company to spend a fortune on cybersecurity, which is a drag on the whole economy. It's a slow bleed. Michael: That's the perfect analogy. And it can be high-tech, too. The Stuxnet worm, which is believed to be a US-Israeli cyberweapon, did the exact same thing to Iran's nuclear program. It didn't blow up the facility. It just got inside their systems and subtly changed the spin speed of their centrifuges, causing them to tear themselves apart over months. It was a digital attack that caused physical destruction. That is pure systems disruption. Kevin: It's a strategy of a thousand paper cuts. You don't need one knockout punch. You just bleed the system until it collapses from exhaustion and cost. Michael: Exactly. And Robb points out this isn't even a new idea. Lawrence of Arabia used the same logic against the Ottoman Turks in World War I. He realized it was better to constantly disrupt their railway—blowing up sections of track here and there—than to try and capture it. By controlling the flow and making it unreliable, he paralyzed their entire army without ever having to fight it directly. Kevin: Wow. So the playbook has been around for a century, but globalization and technology have put it on steroids. Michael: They've put it on a global, instantaneous, and terrifyingly accessible platform.

Kevin: This is a lot to take in. We've got these networked, entrepreneurial guerrillas using systems disruption to bleed superpowers dry. If globalization and technology created this monster, what's the fix? Do we just unplug the internet and go back to living in walled cities? Michael: It's a tempting thought, but Robb argues that's precisely the wrong move. The knee-jerk reaction is to build bigger walls, create more centralized security agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, and grant more surveillance powers. But he says that just creates a more brittle, fragile system—a bigger, more tempting target. Kevin: So what's the alternative? Michael: The solution has to mirror the problem. You can't fight a decentralized, adaptable network with a rigid, centralized hierarchy. You have to fight a network with a network. Robb's ultimate argument is for building decentralized resilience. Kevin: Okay, another big term. What does 'decentralized resilience' look like in the real world? Michael: Think about the electrical grid. Right now, it's a one-way system. Huge power plants push electricity out to consumers. It's efficient, but if a major plant or a few key transmission hubs are knocked out, millions go dark. A resilient system would be two-way. It would be a platform where homes with solar panels can sell excess power back to the grid, where local communities have micro-grids that can operate independently if the main grid goes down. It's more complex, but it has no single point of failure. Kevin: I see. So instead of one giant, fragile system, you have thousands of smaller, interconnected, and more robust ones. You distribute the risk. Michael: You distribute the risk, and you empower people. Robb's ultimate point, and it's a profound one, is that in this new era, security is no longer just the government's job. It's not something we can outsource to a massive agency. It's becoming a shared responsibility. Kevin: That's a heavy thought. It makes you wonder, in our own lives and communities, are we building fragile, top-down systems or resilient, bottom-up ones? From our food supply to our information sources. Michael: Exactly. It’s a question worth thinking about, and it's what makes Brave New War so enduringly relevant. We'd love to hear your take. Find us on our socials and join the conversation. What systems in your life feel the most fragile? Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.