One of Winds' ongoing themes over the years has been the growing confluence of terrorism and crime, a theme explored in special depth via my Terror, Inc. series.
William S. Lind of Defense and the National Interest writes:
"Meanwhile, drug smugglers and guerrilla forces like the FARC work together more easily than states do. The state system is old, creaky, formalistic and slow. Drug dealing and guerrilla warfare represent a free market, where deals happen fast. Several years ago, a Marine friend went down to Bolivia as part of the U.S. counter-drug effort. He observed that the drug traffickers went through Boyd Cycle or OODA Loop six times in the time it took us to go through it once. When I relayed that to Colonel Boyd, he said, "Then we're not even in the game"
Then he follows up with something I've been wondering, too:
"How long will it be before al Qaeda and other Islamic non-state forces make their own alliances with the drug gangs and people smugglers who are experts in getting across America's southern border? Or use the excellent distribution systems the drug gangs have throughout the United States to smuggle something with a bigger bang than the best cocaine?"
Maybe a while - to say that allowing this would be bad for the drug lords' business is a massive understatement. Still, this isn't the most stable set of individuals we're talking about here, and control over the network is, ah, less than perfect.
If Islamist terrorists dangled a couple mil before the right mid-level person, anything is possible. And the current "border enforcement as joke" situation does not fill me with confidence.
Lind concludes:
"Just as we see states coming together around the world against the non-state forces of the Fourth Generation, so those non-state forces will also come together in multi-faceted alliances. The difference is likely to be that they will do it faster and better. And, they will use states' preoccupation with the state system like a matador's cape, to dazzle and distract while they proceed with the real business of war."
Or crime... even as the distinction blurs. Money laundering is global, and the major organized crime groups mostly cooperate rather than compete. As their power grows, they acquire global-level interests. Meanwhile, the terrorist IRA has become the "RAfia," allied with its suppliers in FARC. It is not alone in making this transition.
And in the background, the technological barriers to biological tools are falling. Furthermore, the same people who are currently in the drug trade have strong reasons to pick that technology up and begin building expertise, in order to refine their product.
I've said before that al-Qaeda is just the tune-up as we step toward a fundamentally different reality. I wasn't kidding. As I noted at the close of The S.P.E.C.T.R.E. of Terror, Inc.:
"Preparing for those eventualities will test our civilization in new ways. It will test not only our brains, but our will and unity. Not just our military, but our culture and values. Think through the full implications of these trends, and the possible responses to them. If you can't come up with plausible cases for at least 2 conclusions that surprise you, you probably aren't thinking hard enough.
The ground is shifting under the feet of the nation state as a political entity. Real structural changes are in the offing, of a kind that can create a very different world. Are we up to the challenge? I don't know. What I do know, is that there is no scriptwriter behind the scenes to ensure a happy ending.
WE are the scriptwriters. Happy endings are NOT guaranteed. And the drama is just beginning."