What do the roadside bombs have in common with cheese in Fedou? Other than semantic associations with a certain nation state?
Well, John Robb and the Global Guerrillas set of memes (systems disruption, systempunkt, etc.) have begun a systematic look at how attacks on resource targets can lead to cascading systems failures across a range of networks.
To me, the trick now is to look at how to develop a theoretical framework for these system failure. Yes, everyone says, attack the hubs and the scale-free networks will fall. But how many interacting networks can be linked? How many hubs, and how hard do you hit them?
One place where this discussion has been underway for a long time is in the study of social-ecological systems. For thirty years, C.S. Holling and his compatriots have be dissecting the links between resource-based environmental systems and their human-based governance bodies.
Their work has a lot to say about why and how linked systems fail or succeed. And--climate change or roadside bombs--I don't think we should ignore them. So let's go to the data.
Holling grabbed the phrase "Panarchy" to describe the linked non-hierarchical systems that are in play within these networks. Panarchy tries to map the transformations of the systems like this:
There's no real starting point here, but Alpha is a system organizational phase, with Omega as a Systems Collapse phase. The system grows in organization (and rigidity) from r to K, whereupond the rigidity precipitates a crisis. The resilience of the system determines whether the linked systems will maintain their integrity ("Remembering" and regrouping at point r) or initiate a full collapse of the system ("Revolting" to point Omega and neccessitating a full reorganization. The small graph is there to show that these associations are nested within other associations; crises in local systems can tricker crises in regional systems and vice versa.
Yikes. Did I lose you yet?
This matters because it give an evidence-based framework to look at
what will cause a given system (or set of systems) to collapse. You
know, when do those pipeline attacks become a system drain, when do
they provoke a full system shutdown, and what elements let the oil
system "remember" itself and hold together.
Beau-coup work to do here, but a new paper in Ecology and Society (Resilience and Regime Shifts: Assessing Cascading Effects) starts putting some of the pieces together. Ann Kinzig and the crew come up with two main features of these social-ecological systems.
First, its important to recognize that there have multiple thresholds (change states) connected to a host of variables that operate in different spaces and at different time scales. So, at any given time, there are lots of options that the system could shift to. And each option has different resilience levels. In effect, this is like the river argument: You can never step in the same river twice. And, every day it's a different pipeline system which is always looking to shift. It's always either organizing or collapsing.
Second, whether it organizes or collapses depends on the threshold
changes or multiple sub-systems. As small edge-systems cross their
collapse thresholds, for instance, it becomes ever more likely that the
general system will collapse. These would be things like small
processing areas, transportation linkages--even food service, care
package delivery. Peripheral systems are all interconnected and can be
used to predicate the general welfare of the larger system. This means
that leaders have to be careful about looking at systems that operate
in different scales of time and space (tiny systems, quick systems,
slow systems), because they also effect the prioritized system's health.
In particular, the authors chart three kinds of scale (Patch, Farm, Region) and three kinds of interaction (Ecological, Economic, Social/Cultural). By looking at how the variables intersect, they can make predications about the fault lines in the system. That's all it takes, they argue, just a handful of variables. As long as you take into account the space/time scale changes in place, and the nested networks that effect the resilience of the current focuse systems.
Now, this is very much from a resource management perspective, but
the deeper you get into the work, the more applicable it is for systems
disruptive attacks. After all, what's more natural to us these days
than fossil fuels, money trails and communications link-ups?
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