Netwar

by veilwar

Beyond thinking about the weapons and techniques of destruction we might aim at the invader, how would we organize? A civilian resistance army might be composed to a large extent out of veterans, and to be sure there are many civilians who have served in combat over the last ten or more years. But any ad hoc organization will not have the traditions and structure of a regular army unit.

People caught, away from home and threatened with death will fight back. How will they organize? Will they use the internet? The infrastructure of the United States outside the areas of enemy control will remain largely intact – and even in areas they have overrun, communications and power may remain operational for days or even longer depending on a variety of factors. Smart phones and laptops with cellular data links will still be functional. Twitter and Instagram could be an enormous source of valuable intelligence should anyone be able to handle the firehose of information that would be uploaded in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.

Could services like twitter be used to organize not flash mobs, but flash armies? (or at least flash platoons or companies, conducting flash-ambushes?) Would wiki pages located on servers out of harm’s way be useful ways to aggregate intelligence? Forums with upvoting tools, like reddit, could allow crowd-sourced sorting of raw intelligence and insight both. Geocaching games could be adapted to means of supplying troops on the run safely. Armies could be dispersed until almost the moment of battle, organized by sms, email, twitter and googlemaps.

What else can you think of?