Hacking war and the end of globalization: Wired interviews John Robb

Wired has a brief interview with John Robb. He's written a book on the modern warfare, with a subtitle of 'the next stage of terrorism and the end of globalization'. From the interview it sounds a lot like the 'falling cost of havoc' stuff with a flavor of emergent networks, hacking war, distributed systems, etc. Fairly prosaic for anyone who's been awake since 2001.

The interesting part is the 'end of globalization'. I can't tell exactly what he means, but from the interview I gather he's saying the global supply chain is extremely vulnerable to disruption. The best way to "attack" the US is to attack our supply chain, since that would drive our economy into deep depression. Sounds plausible to me, the one caveat being the 'x factor'.

X factor? Whatever it is that has allowed us to avoid inevitable doom since Oct 31, 1952.