Recommended Reading

When the FBI thwarted the tunnels plot, the Brooklyn Al Kifah office and most of the other satellite locations were shuttered. But in Boston, the work continued under a new name and with a new focus: supporting foreign-fighter efforts in Bosnia and Chechnya. 

Dr. Chet Richards –Is 4GW dead? 

….The 9/11 attacks, by a transnational guerrilla movement, seemed to confirm 4GW in both of its forms. In the last few years, however, everything has gone quiet. Transnational insurgencies, “global guerrillas” as John Robb terms them, have not become a significant factor in geopolitics. “Continuing irritation” might best describe them, whose primary function seems to be upholding national security budgets in frightened western democracies. The state system has not noticeably weakened. So it might be fair at this point to conclude that although 4GW was a legitimate theory, well supported by logic and data, the world simply didn’t develop along the lines it proposed.

….The conditions for insurgency, as described by Boyd in Patterns of Conflict, had been defused by reforms in the early 20th century. Within the last 25 years or so, these conditions have returned. The austerity measures in southern Europe, the decline in living standards and economic polarization in the United States, and the enormous increase in firepower available to the general citizenry (at least in the US) will combine to produce abrupt changes in political organization. So long as the democratic process remains uncorrupted, these changes will be largely peaceful. In non-democratic states, and in those democracies where the beneficiaries of highly-skewed income and wealth distributions attempt to hang on to their gains by whatever means they deem necessary, we should expect higher levels of violence.

Social Evolution Forum – How to Overthrow an Empire and Replace it with your Own

Registan.net –Contextualizing Media Claims in Boston, About the Central Asian Link to those Boston Bombers, Freedom and Fear in Central Asia: How the Security Assistance Debate is Asking the Wrong Questions

Haft of the Spear -Explaining Computer Security Through the Lens of Boston 

Global Guerrillas –OPEN SOURCE WARFARE never goes away 

Marine Corps Gazette Blog – Marine Corps End Strength: 100k and End Strength 100k: Fixed-Wing Air 

Hmmm…America wants more than a tiny Marine Corps

Dr. David Ronfeldt –Further points about “tribes” (T) — plus a new proposition about TIMN as a whole

WPR Dr. Steven Metz –Strategic Horizons: U.S. Professional Military Education on the Chopping Block 

Campaign Reboot – Kill Chain 

SWJ El Centro – How to Win the Mexican Drug War 

Jamestown Foundation  – Shattering the al Qaida-Chechen Myth 

Nick Carr – Augmentor and Augmentee 

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