Brave New War Quotes

“A primary loyalty is a form of ancient moral connection that transcends loyalty to the nation-state. These include connections to family, clan, tribe, gang, religion, and ethnicity. These loyalties are reciprocated through the delivery of political goods (economic aid, safety, and more) that the state cannot or will not deliver.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“In OSW, the source code of warfare is available for anyone who is interested in both modifying and extending it. This means the tactics, weapons, strategies, target selection, planning methods, and team dynamics are all open to community improvement. Global guerrillas can hack at the source code of warfare to their hearts’ delight.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“Al-Qaeda doesn’t want to govern Iraq or Saudi Arabia. It wants to collapse them and exercise power through feudal relationships in the vacuum created by their failure.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“A simple way to understand this is to think of these potential attacks as negative system perturbations—or more simply, as black swans, an unexpected negative event that cannot be predicted with any degree of certainty. The time, the target, and the form of the next system perturbations are unknown because they are clouded in uncertainty.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“To global guerrillas, the point of greatest emphasis is the systempunkt. It is the point in a system (either an infrastructure system or a marketplace), usually identified by one of the many autonomous groups operating in the field, that will collapse the target system if it is destroyed.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“The most disturbing aspect of the rise of global guerrillas is that they have found a way to fight nation-states strategically without the use of weapons of mass destruction. This method, collectively called systems disruption, uses sabotage of critical systems to inflict economic costs on the target state.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“In the past, winning meant having the largest army. That isn’t true anymore. Now, with new forms of warfare, any small group can successfully wage war. With simpler and more appealing goals, almost any cause can raise an army. And they will.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“the use of systems disruption as a method of strategic warfare has the potential to cast the United States in the role that the Soviet Union held during the 1980s—a country driven to bankruptcy by a foe it couldn’t compete with economically.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“In terms of innovation in ideas, our nonstate foes leveraged the vast body of literature on guerrilla warfare (in particular Lind et al.’s 4GW) that was developed in the United States. It isn’t unusual that the people who develop these new theories of warfare live in the countries that don’t benefit from them. Advanced Western military theory has historically provided sustenance to our revisionist foes. For example, the British military theorists J. F. C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell Hart provided the theoretical basis of armored warfare that Heinz Guderian and others, in the nascent German military before World War II, used to formulate the blitzkrieg. So while the image of al-Qaeda strategists squatting in Afghan caves reading Lind et al.’s 4GW theory may be hard to imagine, it shouldn’t be any more fantastic than Guderian practicing Fuller’s theories with cardboard tanks. Both happened.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“This fourth-generation warfare (4GW) codified the use of guerrilla and terrorist proxies as the primary means of warfare between states, large and small. In Lind et al.’s view, 4GW was a method of warfare that allowed the weak forces to defeat the strong.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“This generation now serves as the desired model for the bulk of the world’s militaries (there is still debate as to whether the U.S. military has totally embraced third-generation warfare, given that it continues to focus on the “synchronized” firepower and centralized command and control of the second generation).”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“To really understand this future, you need to discard the idea of state-versus-state conflict. That age is over. It ended with the rise of nuclear weapons, the integration of the world’s economies, and the end of the cold war. Wars between states are now, for all intents and purposes, obsolete. The real remaining threat posed by wars between states, in those rare cases when they do occur by choice, is that they will create a vacuum within which these non-state groups can thrive.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“Even the guerrilla war in Iraq hasn’t forced any substantive changes to our defense structure. This isn’t due to a nefarious plot at the highest levels of government. It is due to the fundamental inability of the nation-state to conceptualize a role that makes sense in fighting and deterring the emerging threat.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

“I keep coming back to the way terrorism and guerrilla warfare is rapidly evolving to allow nonstate networks to challenge the structure and order of nation-states. It is a change on par with the rise of the Internet and China, and will dramatically change how you and your children view security.”
― John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization