Smart insurgents and terrorists, dumb United States responses

Shorter David Brooks: Terrorists and insurgents are smarter than we are.

I often find myself supremely annoyed with Brooks, but I think he's right about this.

Here's an excerpt from the column:

That’s because setbacks in the war on terror [how annoying that Brooks uses this ridiculous phrase!] don’t only flow from the mistakes of individual leaders and generals. They’re structural. Thanks to a series of organizational technological innovations, guerrilla insurgencies are increasingly able to take on and defeat nation-states.
[...]
There are between 70 and 100 groups that make up the Iraqi insurgency, and they are organized, Robb says, like a bazaar. It’s pointless to decapitate the head of the insurgency or disrupt its command structure, because the insurgency doesn’t have these things. Instead, it is a swarm of disparate companies that share information, learn from each other’s experiments and respond quickly to environmental signals.
[...]
Robb is pessimistic (excessively so) that top-heavy, pork-driven institutions like the Defense Department or the Department of Homeland Security can ever keep up with open-source insurgencies. Since 9/11, he believes, big government institutions have engaged in a process of hindsight re-engineering designed to reduce future risk, when in fact, the very nature of the threat is that it’s random and cannot be anticipated.

I don't like Brooks' use of the "war on terror" frame. I believe our lumping insurgencies, sectarian conflict, 9/11 terrorism, and failed-state lawlessness into this one idea of "the war on terror" is folly. It's a major reason why we are having such difficulty dealing with all these things.

But Brooks is right about the structural advantages all these small groups have over our lumbering, bureaucratic, behemoths. Having someone as willfully ignorant and unable to adapt to reality as Bush at the top doesn't help us. But even if the president lacked these crippling attributes, I think there would still be an organizational gap.

Stepping back to a meta-level (which gets me all warm and fuzzy; I hope it does the same for you), I think one of the over-arching meta-narratives of our times is going to be: New, open-source, bottom-up, people-powered, technology-enabled movements come into conflict with old, information-hoarding, top-down, heirarchy-driven, change-resistant institutions; and how the former eventually prevailed over the later. There are both positive and negative stories that I believe fit this meta-narrative:

• The netroots taking on the Democratic political establishment, bringing it more in line with the wants and needs of the American people.
• The Catholic church losing ground to numerous small Evangelical Protestant and Islamic groups throughout the world.
• Established pundits in all areas of expertise reacting with fear and disdain to the reality that with the Web, anyone can practice punditry. And that the collective wisdom that emerges from a swarm of amateurs bickering can equal or exceed the pontificating of credentialed professionals.
  
• The inability of the nation-state militaries to cope with decentralized, non-state threats (including drug traffickers) until they adopt more flexible approaches
• The recording industry completely flubbing the arrival of new technology, seeking at every turn to squelch mp3's, file-sharing, etc. while their old business model crumbles.