Brave New War

"This is a book that everybody should read, particularly anybody who cares about national security. I have been to various meetings at the Foreign Office and other places and every time I meet anyone who has anything to do with counter-terrorism I say, you must read this book. And, in the manner of civil servants, they usually nod and it is very clear they have no intention of reading it, which makes me more frightened. John Robb who wrote it is a counter-terrorism expert and a former red team player. In other words, he is one of these guys who think up ways of how to destroy his own side. He plays the enemy. To follow on from what I was saying about McMafia, he shows how networks, be they criminal or terrorist, have linked up with each other to create a new type of terrorism. He describes a future in which small ad-hoc bands of insurgents will identify and exploit gaps in vital systems and generate a huge return. The book also describes the growth of the terrorist marketplace and how it behaves like a bazaar. Terrorist networks now outsource to freelancers – for instance, they buy in a hollowed-out car from a chop shop to create a vehicle-borne IED (improvised explosive device), and stack of artillery shells from a local insurgent group. Their actions are designed to provoke copycat attacks, as other networks in the bazaar innovate and identify new weaknesses. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One particular event that Robb describes caught my attention: during the summer of 2004, a small group of insurgents blew up a southern section of the Iraqi oil pipeline infrastructure. Their maps were highly accurate and showed exactly which pipeline, buried in a maze of others, was the critical one they wanted. They had only to dig a six-foot hole in the sand, place the charges and detonate them. The explosion itself wasn’t even that large, but it was more than sufficient to burst the shell of the 48-inch high-pressure oil line. The attack cost an estimated $2,000 while the explosion cost Iraq $500 million in lost oil exports – a rate of return 250,000 times the cost of the attack. I think we have been lucky so far that more of this type of thing hasn’t happened, but the potential is there."