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Power to the People
Audrey Kurth Cronin
Power to the People
How Open Technological
Innovation Is Arming
Tomorrow’s Terrorists
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Audrey Kurth Cronin 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–0–19–088214–3
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Professor Sir Adam Roberts, who gave power to the pupil.
viii Contents
8 Open Innovation of Reach: From AK-47s to Drones, Robots, Smartphones, and 3D Printing 200
9 An Army of One Launches Many: Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence 231
Conclusion: Strategy for Democracies in an Age of Lethal Empowerment 256
Appendix A: Detailed Contents 269 Appendix B: Methodology 273 Notes 283 Books Cited 383 Index 401
Acknowledgments 431
We live in an epoch of unprecedented popular empowerment. Increasing access to information, rising global living standards, growing literacy, and improving medical care and longevity are just a handful of the benefits derived from the modern march of technological innovation. Yet the same technologies that are furthering prosperity are creating critical new security vulnerabilities.
The worldwide dispersal of emerging technologies, such as commercial drones, cyber weapons, 3D printing, military robotics, and autonomous systems, is generating gaping fissures in the ability of conventional armed forces to combat lethal capabilities of non-state actors, most notably terrorists, but also rogue lone actors, insurgent groups, and private armies. As these malcontents gain power through emerging technologies, the defenses of the law-abiding are increasingly breached. Traditional rights, such as privacy, property ownership, and freedom of movement, are under unprecedented attack by autocratic regimes, not to mention private companies, which monetize our online behavior. Not only are democratic governments unable to protect innocent citizens from such invasions, they engage in them themselves, reading individuals’ emails, monitoring their phone calls, tracking their every move online, and consolidating their behavioral data.
Every day we learn of fresh examples of the new breed of technologies being used for malevolent ends or posing potential new dangers. But while we’ve become aware that intelligence services may be listening to your phone calls and tracking your emails, and that Apple, Facebook, Google, and other
corporations are mining our data and selling it to advertisers, the potential uses of the new technologies for violence are less discussed. Is anyone protecting you from having your Internet-connected Jeep Cherokee hacked and accelerated into a wall? The ease of doing so was demonstrated in 2015, when security specialists Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek commandeered a Jeep, with the agreement of its driver, journalist Andy Greenberg, disabling the accelerator as he drove down a highway, just as a tractor-trailer truck was barreling up from behind him. Or, what happens when your Amazon delivery drone carries a bomb-filled package instead of prescription medicine? The Islamic State, Hezbollah, and Jund al-Aqsa (an al-Qaeda-associated group) have deployed explosives this way. In 2017, the Islamic State jerry-rigged commercial drones to carry explosives and filmed nearly a dozen of them dropping small bombs on US and Iraqi tanks, vehicles, and people, eventually killing more than a dozen and injuring many more.1 Drones and self-driving cars are not only exciting advances for consumers; they are also new means of conducting political violence by militant groups and self-radicalized individuals.
Never before have so many had access to such advanced technologies capable of inflicting death and mayhem. Unless we better understand the rapidly developing threats, governments, especially democracies, will be increasingly unable to combat them.
This book explores how individuals and groups who engage in political violence have repeatedly made use of emerging technologies to wreak havoc, and how they’re likely to do so in the future. Many scholars have argued that such non-state combatants rarely innovate new forms of weaponry; that they are tactically sophisticated but technologically crude.2 Regarding the danger of more sophisticated weaponry getting into their hands, especially so-called weapons of mass destruction, the focus has been mainly on groups acquiring weapons from states rather than learning to produce their own. That is too limited a purview, conditioned by the experience of the last fifty years. A longer historical view, stretching back to the nineteenth century, reveals that, in fact, terrorists and insurgents have repeatedly seized opportunities presented by new technologies, innovating deadly new uses for them, and sometimes even adopting them ahead of their use by traditional military forces. When clusters of new technologies become widely accessible to the public, their innovations are particularly lethal and fast-spreading. We are in such an era now.
Placing our current technological advances into the historical context of key innovations used to wage politically disruptive violence, this book will first explore why certain kinds of emerging technologies are rapidly adopted by rogue actors. We’ll then consider how those emerging today are already changing who is able to muster formidable armies and show up
on the battlefield, how individual acts of violence can be perpetrated, and even who may gain the ability to catalyze state-to-state wars. Traditional warfare concepts of the massing of force, logistics, and power projection— the understanding of which has been essentially stable for centuries—must evolve in the face of novel challenges. Imagine a successor to the Islamic State, for example, teaming small numbers of fighters with autonomous suicide attack vehicles, flying unmanned systems through urban sewer systems, and assassinating key government leaders with facial recognition software, all while using 3D printing to reproduce an endless supply of replacement parts, such as drone blades and motors. Technological advancements are heightening global instability in ways that extend far beyond the battlefield. States will still be the dominant form of governance, but tomorrow’s question is what kinds of states? New technologies enable increasingly powerful non-state actors to affect the answer. Power is shifting away from democratic states, and they must prepare for, and defend against, the potentially seismic consequences.
The United States is especially vulnerable to being caught on the back foot by this surge of technology and weapons diffusion. The country leads the world in the development of high-tech weaponry, and its defense strategy is predicated on this technological superiority. Yet the effectiveness of that formidable arsenal in the face of emerging threats must be thoroughly reexamined. The failure to win decisive victories in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has demonstrated this. Meanwhile a recent re-emergence of majorpower competition, particularly between the United States and China, is likely to keep the focus of military planners on large-scale, high-end weapons systems rather than on building capabilities and strategy to defend against more pervasive and less obvious emerging threats.
The US defense community is predominantly focused on competing technologically with state rivals at the high end, while slighting centuries of experience in how violent individuals and groups improvise, sometimes unleashing unexpected waves of political disruption that topple regimes and trigger interstate war. Many of the most revolutionary changes in warfare, the most surprising victories and losses, have occurred as a result not of new technologies on the battlefield, but of broader changes in society affecting who used weaponry, where, when, why, and how. With the maturing of the digital revolution and the beginning of the robotics revolution, we are seeing the combination of rapid technological innovation and that kind of widespread societal change, especially in how people shape, spread, and evaluate information, then acquire the means to act upon it. The result will be dramatic transformation of the character of war, not just in the form
of ongoing cyber warfare or further integration of autonomy into military weapons, already well underway, or the widespread proliferation of highpowered drone weaponry from state to state. The changes will also involve the redistribution of relative power between states and nonstate actors, who will surprise traditional militaries and police forces with innovative uses of the technologies.
Despite the breathless claims of many technology promoters, what is crucial today for national security is not the transformative power of the new technologies, but the transformative power of human beings throughout the world to adapt them to unanticipated purposes. That is where their true revolutionary power lies. Individuals and groups harnessing the emerging innovations may actually be capable of undermining global stability and, as in the past, even sparking interstate war.
Technology is no longer necessarily on the side of the major powers. This book explains why and what to do about it.
The book is not a treatise on technology; it does not go into great detail about the design and capabilities of the emerging technologies, which are discussed in nontechnical terms. The focus, instead, is on the potential uses of the technologies and the need for strategy that anticipates them. The competition that matters most now to the security of the United States and its allies is not in technology development but in strategy development. And in that they have a long way to go. Developing clearer doctrine for how and when to deploy the new breed of weapons, and how and when not to deploy them, is vital. Crafting scenarios of how the technologies may be deployed, and combined, in innovative ways by rogue actors is also crucial.
No anti-technology screed, this book aims to illuminate how to maximize the promise and minimize the risks of emerging technologies. That requires understanding how to distinguish between technologies that will advance global stability and those that will undermine it, widening the scope beyond high-profile arms races and state-to-state competitions. Key questions include: How and why do non-state actors innovate differently from state actors? Why do violent non-state actors adopt certain technologies more readily and widely than others? How have past technological advances driven waves of political violence and destabilized the world, and what does that historical record show us about the threats from today’s emerging technologies? Finally, how can that history guide our actions going forward?
Answering those questions requires close examination of the doubleedged aspect of technological innovation.
Innovation is undoubtedly the engine that drives human progress. No one would dispute that throughout human history, advances in engineering, medicine, physics, computer science, and so forth have vastly improved the quality of life for billions, propelling economic, social, and political development. But every technological innovation involves risks as well as promises, and some new technologies present more risks than others. Those risks may be inherent to the technologies, such as the danger of a nuclear cataclysm, or may be due primarily to the technologies becoming accessible to people who maliciously exploit them. Some lethal and destabilizing consequences are deliberate; others result from human error. Understanding the risks is vital to averting threats.
The focus here is on technologies that were developed with good intentions, such as digital media and drones. They were created to solve pressing social problems, such as expanding public access to information and making war more precise and humane. But some of them can be fashioned into relatively low-cost, powerful, and precise weapons. They have also inadvertently undermined our laws and ethical guidelines, such as the protection of civilians, the right to privacy, or the state’s monopoly on the use of armed force, and challenged military doctrine and national policies. By not thinking through the full implications of emerging technologies as they’ve been developing, focusing primarily on their benefits and profitability and not their likelihood of sparking surprise violence, neither the companies creating them nor the governments employing them have built viable long-term strategies for combating their use for nefarious purposes.
There are three reasons why a comprehensive strategic approach to the development and regulation of these technologies has been lacking, one historical and two contemporary. First, many of the innovations have emerged in the United States, and Americans have tended to be techno-optimists. The national impulse has been to embrace the commercialization of technology without thinking through the broader economic, political, cultural, and security implications. In the nineteenth century, excitement over new inventions, such as the railroad engine, the telegraph, and the automobile, swept the country and, indeed, helped to build it into the world’s dominant power.
Technophilia entered a new heyday during the Second World War, when the United States rapidly expanded its industrial capacity, transforming into the “arsenal of democracy.” The Allied Powers won the war largely due to a wealth of technological innovations, including radar, the aircraft carrier, encryption and decryption, and, of course, the atomic bomb. Technological innovation became the focus of US military strategy, with the emphasis on gaining advantages in firepower, speed, range, stealth, cryptography, and
reconnaissance for warfare waged on traditional battlefields, in tandem with the buildup of a deterrent nuclear arsenal. Over the course of the twentieth century, the result was the innovation of a string of sophisticated high-end technologies, such as ballistic missiles and airborne early warning and control systems (AEW&C). All of these were vital to Cold War competition and, arguably, to the West’s ultimate success and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet with the growing predominance of asymmetric warfare, especially after the first Persian Gulf War (1990–1991), the US military saw diminishing returns for its massive expenditures on these capabilities.
The second reason for the failure to develop adequate strategy regarding the emerging technologies is that the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to an urgent focus on rapid deployment of new offensive and defensive capabilities. The United States rushed to make use of drones and autonomous robots in order to curtail further terrorist attacks and reduce the ghastly toll of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which had been unanticipated. New technologies, many of them sent to the battlefield minus the usual extensive testing and refinement, allowed the military to target individual terrorists, develop better reconnaissance, and launch preemptive strikes, saving many American and allied lives. But they did not lead to decisive victory.
These wars have shown that even with awe-inspiring technology and overwhelming force, military operations have limited effect in eradicating unconventional forces and advancing political and security objectives. No sooner did the United States begin to extricate itself from these conflicts than new fronts of battle emerged, with the outbreak of civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State.
The third reason little progress has been made in governance over emerging technologies is that private companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, are driving so much of their development, with their mandate being to generate profits rather than to secure peace. Making the Internet more accessible and selling products enabled with Internet access—the socalled Internet of Things—and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, such as voice recognition, have indeed become core drivers of economic growth, which is in the national interest. What’s more, if the United States doesn’t keep up a lively pace of innovation, its current competitive edge will be eclipsed by other major powers, especially China.
Simply clamping down on private innovation is neither feasible for the United States and its democratic allies, nor desirable. Authoritarian states have held a tighter grip over their technology innovators and public access to the technologies. For instance, China censors the dissemination of
information on its national Internet with its Great Firewall and exercises close government oversight of its IT corporations, such as Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei, and Baidu. This autocratic control is unacceptable for democratic regimes, and it’s far from certain, at any rate, that autocratic powers will be able to sustain it as the technologies continue to develop, offering citizens increasing means of evading government oversight.
Yet ceding totally free rein to companies is also unwise. They naturally emphasize the benefits and underplay the risks. DNA editing may be able to conquer genetic diseases, but it may also result in unintended consequences, called “off-target effects.” Quantum computing may resolve intractable puzzles but also destabilize global security systems by breaking prevalent forms of encryption.3 Artificial intelligence may be used to protect populations, but it may also become unmoored from human control.4 A laissez-faire approach has already proven foolish: widespread linked sensors in everything from refrigerators to thermostats provide opportunities for hackers to wreak havoc with vehicles, in households and bank accounts, and with assaults on utilities and other infrastructure. And the vast amount of behavioral information gathered through sensors and aggregated in massive databases threatens privacy and self-sufficiency. A middle way between unfettered innovation and oppressive regulation will be necessary if the United States and its allies are to navigate between the Scylla of anarchy and the Charybdis of authoritarianism.
Finding that optimal approach toward the future of security will require an appreciation of why some new technologies are predictably evolutionary in their effects on conflict, while others unexpectedly and fundamentally alter the equation. The first are sustaining technologies, and the second are disruptive.
Disruptive technologies often democratize access to lethal capabilities, shifting unprecedented power into the hands of civilians. This was the case, for example, with the invention of dynamite, which fueled an outbreak of politically motivated bombings in the nineteenth century, destabilizing several of Europe’s autocratic regimes and contributing to the outbreak of the First World War. It’s the case again today with the cluster of emerging capabilities.
The word “disruptive” is often used to describe any kind of technological advance that is unanticipated, such as in a 2010 report by the National Academies of Science that defined a disruptive technology as “an innovative technology that triggers sudden and unexpected effects.” 5 This misses a critical aspect of the disruption caused—that it shifts power from dominant players, whether in business or the governmental and military domains, to
surprise actors. Such a shift is underway today and it presents a bedeviling problem for military and national security forces.
In most military planning, not to mention popular histories of the evolution of military technology, sustaining innovation at the high end draws the lion’s share of attention. The balance of tanks, ships, missiles, and aircraft among states is intricately parsed to formulate assessments about likely outcomes in a next major war.6 The focus on these capabilities is important, but it is too narrow. Major new threats to the international security order are coming from innovations at the low end, developed from technology created for widespread commercial use. While the current wave of disruptive commercial technologies offers a bounty of opportunity for businesses, and a boon of great new products and services for consumers, it poses wicked problems for national security. Anticipating the nature of the threats requires an appreciation of the dynamics by which disruptive technologies emerge and are adopted.
Disruptive technologies meet specific criteria that differentiate them from sustaining evolutionary ones. To consider the differences we can turn to Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen, who coined the term “disruptive innovation” in a 1995 article reporting on findings from a study he conducted.7 He wanted to understand why well-managed, customer-sensitive firms that were pioneers in their fields, such as Texas Instruments, Sears, Xerox, and IBM, often suddenly faced crippling competition from smaller firms that took superior advantage of technological developments, many of which the powerhouses had helped innovate. A famous case is Apple’s commercialization of computer mouse technology that Xerox had pioneered. Analyzing case studies from two different economic sectors—how progressively smaller disks replaced 8-inch digital disk drive technology and how hydraulic-powered excavators replaced mechanical shovels—Christensen developed a framework he then explored through a range of cases involving other firms. That work led him to a theory of disruptive technological change.8
Most new technologies, he pointed out, are sustaining rather than disruptive. Sustaining technologies improve an established product or service along lines current customers value and expect. Those changes can be either incremental or radical—for example, adding global positioning system (GPS) capability to a car dashboard versus developing a fully self-driving Tesla Model S. Performance is enhanced, product design is improved, more sophisticated software is written, or new product features are added. These improvements drive established customers to upgrade to new models, which are typically more expensive, and this often leads to higher company profits.
The dangers are that enhancements may eventually exceed the demands of existing customers, while price increases turn them away. Meanwhile, large numbers of potential customers at lower income levels are priced out of the market from the start—like the millions of Honda or Fiat buyers who would never shop for a Tesla Model S.
Disruptive technologies, on the other hand, shake up existing markets, undercutting the competitive advantage of established industry leaders. These disruptions may involve creating an entirely new market, as with that for commercial drones, or the expansion of an existing one at the low end by making a product cheaper, such as with smartphones or tabletop printers. In the latter case, the lower-priced product often initially offers poorer performance, but succeeds nonetheless because it attracts so many customers, not only due to affordability but to appealing features that make up for performance shortfalls. Christensen writes, “Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use.”9 Often the novelty of disruptive products, or their performance issues, leads to a limited initial market of “early adopters,” who are seen by dominant firms as fringe customers whose requirements they do not need to cater to. That opens the door to upstart competitors.
Christensen’s theory is not without its critics. Some argue that he chose only successful cases and question the predictive capacity of the theory. Others point to things omitted from his case studies (like widespread economic downturns that affected established companies), the murkiness of some examples (“sustaining” companies bought by other companies that thrived), the vast majority of “disruptive” start-ups that fail, and his strictly profit-based definition of “success.” Still others mischaracterize Christensen’s original argument, vastly expanding the meaning of “disruption,” as we’ve seen. The theory of disruptive innovation has nonetheless been one of the most influential business concepts of the past two decades and helps explain how lower-performance technologies sometimes overcome betterperforming ones.10
A classic case of disruptive innovation is Henry Ford’s creation of the Model T car in 1908. The automobile was nothing new. Karl Friedrich Benz of Germany had invented the first gasoline-powered automobile in 1886,11 and other European companies had developed cars incorporating far more advanced technologies, such as Porsche’s 1899 four-wheel-drive electric car or Renault’s 1902 drum brakes. Compared to these, the Model T was a joke, a crummy little putterer with a maximum speed of around 40 miles per hour that came in only one color, black, and didn’t even have doors.12 Yet while the sleek racing cars and classic roadsters of the period were playthings
of the prosperous, the assembly-line-produced Model T was so cheap that masses of Americans bought it. The original price of a “Tin Lizzy” was $850 compared to the Cadillac Model 30, which sold for $1,400 (and up), or the 1908 Packard 30 touring car, whose standard sticker price was $4,000.13 So popular was the Model T that Ford was able to drive the price continually lower, to under $300 by 1927.
The extraordinary impact on the whole market for automobiles in the United States can be seen in a set of statistics for car ownership by country from 1924. In the United States the count was one car for every seven residents compared to one for every 78 residents in the United Kingdom, 108 in France, 470 in Germany, and 654 in Italy.14
Over the past several decades, we have seen this disruption process unfold in many domains. The personal computer disrupted expensive mainframe computers. Smartphones disrupted cell phones. Cheap tabletop printers and scanners disrupted high-volume Xerox machines. Discount retailers like Walmart disrupted dominant department stores such as Sears. Health maintenance organizations disrupted traditional health insurers.
Established firms often struggle with the competition from disruptive technologies not due to a lack of talent, imagination, or entrepreneurship. Often they are actually far more advanced in developing new technologies, and they’re frequently alert enough to acquire start-ups with technology that looks promising. Instead they typically fail to take full advantage of disruptive technologies due to their current business incentives, which encourage them to focus on the more predictable profitability of pleasing their existing customers by serving their needs better and better. Meanwhile the entire market morphs. They face what Christensen called “the innovator’s dilemma,” the problem of meeting the competing mandates: to maintain advantage in an established line of business while also not being overtaken by the innovation commercialized by upstarts. While hindsight can make the decisions about how to navigate the challenges seem obvious, they are generally anything but easy to make as disruption is getting underway.
Leading corporations are pressured by shareholders to produce reliable short-term revenue growth, which in turn generally assures robust stock prices. Ironically, the more successful the firm, the more difficult it is to resist this pressure. The most dependable way to assure strong short-term growth is to focus on incremental improvement to upmarket, higher-performance products with premium prices. So the pursuit of the kinds of initially small and often poorly defined low-end markets that generally constitute first adopters of disruptive technologies are not initially attractive to them. While
established firms may not be forced out of business by these upstarts, they are often unable to gain sizeable market share as they seek to catch up, because with disruptive technologies, the early leaders capture a decisive “first mover” advantage.15
A vital point for those who wish to prevent malevolent uses of the currently emerging technologies is that despite the mythology that often develops later, technological disruptions never appear out of the blue: Ford could not have built the Model T without the development of the electric utility industry and global supply chains, for example.16 Clusters of new technologies lead to disruption, and careful analysis can reveal how such clusters yield disruptive potential. That analysis is urgent now, but the governments of both democratic nations and autocracies are still mainly focused on improving sustaining military technologies.
Military technology has typically evolved by making improvements upon existing capabilities, such as accuracy or stealth. Upgrades are most often incremental, but even some radical leaps still qualify as sustaining, such as the development of precision-guided munitions, first used by the Germans in the 1940s, and the jump to stealth aircraft, developed beginning in the 1970s. As is true with businesses offering upgraded products, the constant development of improved military weaponry has increased costs, in this case dramatically. The arsenals of the world’s leading powers are stocked with Porsches not Model Ts, the most extreme example being nuclear weapons, which are so politically and financially costly to develop that only nine states have as of yet been able to do so.
Sustaining innovation in major capabilities such as missiles, ships, aircraft, and tanks is indeed important. Staying at the forefront of such highlevel technological development is vital to maintaining the perception of a state’s relative power in the international arena, and these stores of massively lethal weaponry have deterred direct wars between the major powers for over seventy years (though several proxy wars have been supported by them). Yet history is replete with examples of the dangers to militaries from disruptive technologies.
States that have failed to adapt to these threats have found their power undermined by changes in the “marketplace” for conflict. Such low-tech changes need not compete head-to-head with dominant militaries. For example, AK-47s proved more important than smart bombs for the Vietcong, and IEDs proved more important than Predator drones for the Afghan Taliban. Or sometimes the process unfolds gradually and involves unanticipated uses of beneficial technologies, and unexpected combinations of them,
so that the consequences become obvious only in retrospect, when power has diffused and it is too late for status quo actors to put the genie back in the bottle. For example, in the 1990s, the United States assumed that communications connectivity would result in war-winning synchronized attacks, but the Internet also helped al-Qaeda synchronize its operations and played a key role in the global spread of suicide attacks. The rapid development of both the motivation and the means of violence has changed the power equation between states and groups of individuals.
Today’s disruptive technologies are following familiar patterns of innovation and diffusion among non-state actors. But the effects of digital technologies will unfold faster and be more extensive than prior disruptive technologies because of the Internet’s unprecedented global reach and mobilizing capacity. Never before has a military power as dominant as the United States shared basic technologies so perfectly designed to democratize the global distribution of power.
The result is that we are in an era of open technological innovation that differs from the mainly closed dynamics of the twentieth century, yet we continue to use closed-technology frameworks to explain it.
In a period of closed military technological innovation, states can largely control access to major technological developments such as nuclear weapons, jet fighters, or precision-guided munitions. These technologies are hard to develop, require high levels of expertise, and are carefully protected by things like security classifications or copyrights. Experts speak of “proliferation” of these weapons and use phrases like “dual use,” meaning that they sometimes have two categories of users: civilian and military. But they’re expensive, rare, and difficult to build.
That model of military technological innovation dominated throughout most of the last century. The iconic image is J. Robert Oppenheimer, working away secretly in a lab with a small team of scientists, developing the nuclear bomb.
At the end of the twentieth century, the United States consciously shifted from closed technological development to open development, spurred by post–Cold War confidence in the triumph of democracy and US dominance. Virtually all of today’s digitally based technological developments originally derive from US publicly financed basic and applied research dating to the midtwentieth century. Today’s smartphones, for example, would not exist without US-government funded programs that created key components, including the microchips, touchscreens, and voice activation systems. That’s not to take away from the stunning creativity that happened in Silicon Valley—or even in Bill
Gates’s parents’ garage or Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard. But the US government also consciously shared formerly protected basic technologies such as GPS and ARPANET to kick-start what followed.
Thirty years later we are witnessing the maturing of an open technological revolution driven by the commercial sector. In open technological innovation, there is popular access to advanced lethal technologies. You do not have to be a nuclear scientist to use them. Indeed, you don’t even have to fully understand them, because many platforms are designed to help people experiment. A much broader range of people is now involved in innovation, including professionals, professional consumers (or pro-sumers), hobbyists, and consumers, so we should speak of “multi-use” technologies not dual use.17 New potentially lethal technologies now diffuse through commercial processes, not just to states but to a range of non-state actors. Fortunately, we can build more relevant models for this period by examining the history of global diffusion in the nineteenth century, another time of open technological innovation.
Just as important to understanding why some technologies rapidly diffuse is analyzing why others do not diffuse. In the case of dynamite, for example, better explosives were created at about the same time, including balastite, guncotton, and gelignite (which dynamite’s inventor himself preferred), but dynamite was the one to broadly catch on. Why? Examining the history of diffusion allows for what I’ll call a “lethal empowerment theory,” helping to anticipate which new technologies hold the greatest potential to become popular tools for political violence in the future. The theory holds that disruptive lethal technologies are
• Accessible
• Cheap
• Simple to use
• Transportable
• Concealable
• Effective (i.e., providing leverage and more “bang for the buck”)
• “Multi-use” (i.e., beyond “dual use”; suitable for a wide range of contexts)
• Not cutting-edge—usually in the second or third wave of innovation
• Bought off-the-shelf (or otherwise easily purchased)
• Part of a cluster of other emerging technologies (which are combined to magnify overall effects)
• Symbolically resonant (which makes them more potent than just their tactical effectiveness)
• Given to unexpected uses
They give individuals and small groups greater power not because they are superior to the high-end technologies of states, and not because the individuals using them can go toe-to-toe with conventional militaries, but because they help mobilize individuals, extend their reach, and provide them with unprecedented command-and-control abilities. In the pages ahead, we’ll see how new technologies have been harnessed for these purposes in the past, and then explore how the emerging disruptive technologies of today are being adopted for the same purposes going forward.
Because the focus here is on violent individuals, terrorist groups, and insurgents who seek political power, criminal syndicates, gangs, drug lords, wildlife poachers, human traffickers, and an enormous range of other criminals who are exploiting the new technologies are not covered. Doing so would require a book of its own, which I hope will be written. Likewise, many positive uses of new technologies by benevolent non-state actors, such as nongovernmental organizations, will not be covered here. Among them are combating corruption, increasing government transparency, and providing a voice for the oppressed in authoritarian states—wonderful technological advancements that have already been discussed well in other books.18
This book is divided into three sections. The first introduces predominant ways of thinking about the innovation and diffusion of military technology and demonstrates their shortfalls as regards the current era. It also examines consistent patterns of the diffusion of lethal technology to violent nonstate actors in the modern era.
Part II takes a close look at how two key innovations—dynamite and the AK-47 assault rifle—drove global waves of non-state violence, in both cases culminating in major upheaval in the international order.
That history informs the analysis in Part III of how clusters of emerging technologies are offering non-state actors unprecedented disruptive power. Today’s drones, advanced robotics, 3D printing, and autonomous systems have more in common with dynamite and Kalashnikovs than they do with military technologies like the airplane and the tank.
The last chapter presents a set of broad policy prescriptions for managing down risk and preventing democratic governments from falling further behind the current trend favoring more lethal power in the hands of terrorists, insurgents, and rogue actors. It also offers specific advice, based upon indepth historical studies of the diffusion of key technologies, regarding which ones are more or less likely to spread and be destabilizing.
The power of states has not been eclipsed, and they must not fall into the trap of being manipulated into overreaction to non-state threats, which is a chief aim of terrorism. The history of modern terrorism demonstrates that attacks are generally designed either to provoke state reactions that undermine a regime’s legitimacy (as in nineteenth-century tsarist Russia), to polarize targeted populations so that they are ungovernable (as the Armed Islamic Group did in Algeria during the 1990s), or to mobilize supporters who are inspired into siding with the group (as the Palestinian Liberation Organization did with the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre).19 All of these are strategies of leverage that draw their power from government responses, inducing states to undermine themselves. A self-defeating state response is a particular risk when there is ambiguity about an attack’s origins, as is often the case with cyberattacks. It is also a growing challenge with the evolution of autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence. Serious study of the growing risks of new technologies and development of robust strategic approaches to limiting them can guide rational responses and keep rogue actors from needling states into lashing out against each other or undermining themselves.
There is nothing inevitable about how new technologies are used. Technology is neither good nor bad in itself. Technology is a tool, and it is what we do with it that makes all the difference.