Brave New War

I have been following John Robb's Blog for about a year now and he always has a lot of great insight into issues of national security, especially terrorism, insurgency, and infrastructure protection. He recently completed a new book, titled Brave New War. I have not read it yet but it apparently relates to a lot of what he writes about on his blog. Wired has a great two part series on John Robb's new book:

Part 1

Part 2

This book focuses on fourth generation warfare and how conflict is moving towards insurgent type attacks (Iraq, Lebanon, etc.) instead of state-on-state conflict. I think it is very interesting that Hugo Chavez is studying the tactics of Iraqi insurgents.

Two key items I took from this:
1) Robb's emphasis on culture and language training is great to see and we all know what happens with a lack of this--Iraq.

2) The current Federal bureaucracy is based on an outdated system (maybe this is too much credit to say it was once 'dated') that is not flexible enough to adapt to these new threats. I could post pages and pages on this but probably won't until I have time to reflect on working in it the past 4 years.

Robb also has a great post on the latest conflict between Russia and Estonia, or what he deems the new 21st century state on state conflict--cyber war.