JUST FINISHED JOHN ROBB’S BRAVE NEW WAR, which I’ve mentioned before. I’m supposed to be reviewing it, so I won’t give too much away, but it’s a sort of dark-side of An Army of Davids — though when he gets past describing the open-source terrorism threats, and starts talking about solutions in terms of distributed capacity, resilience, horizontal knowledge, and small-scale approaches, it sounds a lot more like Army of Davids in general. He’s certainly right to note the disturbing vulnerability of all sorts of systems to sabotage designed to produce network disruption. He’s perhaps a bit unwilling to emphasize, though, how much of the success of terrorist operations depends on ideological/public opinion constraints on national responses, constraints that could evaporate overnight and that show some signs of weakening already. That said, I think the book’s very much worth your attention.

Some earlier thoughts of mine in a related vein can be found here, here, here, and here. And, on a more individual level, here.

Most current systems are designed to be cheap. We need to think harder about making them robust, even if that’s more expensive.