Make gray-zone war expensive again
We've let our adversaries get away with too much, for too long
“A home attack with a bomb or weapons of war, a home invasion, or a kidnapping are all easily ordered online. You don’t even need to go to the dark web; a Snapchat account is all it takes.” Such was the translation by Politico of an investigating judge in Antwerp, decrying in a public letter this week that Belgium’s state institutions — from its courts to its customs offices — are buckling under the weight of corruption and crime.
Earlier this year, I talked with researcher Daniela Richterova on the Riskgaming podcast about this very subject in an episode titled, “How Russia is bringing the cost of global sabotage to zero.” In her research, she describes a Snow Crash–esque cyberpunk gig economy of would-be saboteurs and bored teenagers who pick up quick murders and propaganda work from listings posted online by terrorism franchises that pay out in cryptocurrency. The terrorists walk away all but anonymous.
At the same time, The Economist declared “the end of the rip-off economy” this week, arguing that the internet had accelerated the spread of quality and pricing information to consumers, allowing them to increase their economic surplus through better knowledge and negotiation in the marketplace.
Left unsaid in such analysis is that intelligence agencies such as Russia’s FSB and China’s Ministry of State Security have similarly been avoiding rip-offs in the freelance saboteur marketplace. It used to be extraordinarily difficult and risky to recruit an asset overseas. The process required prodigious training and careful psychological profiling of case officers, who were then sent behind enemy lines to identify leads, cultivate them over time, suss out their reserve prices for activities ranging from mundane surveillance to brazen homicide, and do it all without getting caught. Tradecraft was incredibly important, and it’s one reason why critics like grand-strategy expert Edward Luttwak are so dismissive of the CIA’s efforts (read Santi Ruiz’s excellent interview with him in Statecraft and also listen to our podcast episode with Zach Dorfman, who is writing a book on the CIA’s non-official cover clandestine officers).
Now, however, these same spy agencies can post a gig on the dark web (or apparently Snapchat), offer $50, and get a random citizen to conduct propaganda work — or worse.
It’s not just the ease with which these transactions are being conducted through social media and consummated with cryptocurrency. It’s also how fast the price has fallen. Data on costs is obviously hard to come by, but Richterova’s research and analysis of Russia’s more open recent tactics indicate that even serious sabotage or arson might cost only hundreds to low thousands of dollars. Since these gigs are handed out through what amounts to a curated auction, prices have dropped precipitously from the heights of the Cold War. There are clearly a lot of would-be saboteurs, and Russia and others have only so many targets they can blow up simultaneously (they can’t trigger all-out war, after all).
The price of construction is always legions higher than the price of destruction.
These activities are intentional. Arson can undermine the defense industrial base powering Ukraine’s army. Sabotage can induce fear among citizens, changing their behavior. Propaganda efforts can swing elections, or simply force politicians to respond to new crises and remove their gaze from overseas.
The price of construction is always legions higher than the price of destruction. Over decades, Jamaica grew into a challenged but growing economy, transitioning from a wrenching $423.70 per capita GDP in 1960 to over $7,000 last year (both present-day U.S. dollars). Six decades of work, 16x improvement. Hurricane Melissa, which swirled at an Earth-record peak speed of 185 miles per hour at landfall earlier this week, will have torn much of that growth asunder in just a few hours.
A catastrophic storm is no different than a Category 5 autocratic “chaos engineer” bent on undermining democratic polities, to use Giuliano da Empoli’s phrase. The cost of tearing apart a France or a Belgium — or even an America — is not Nvidia-scale in the trillions of dollars. The cost is cheaper than a fraudulent SPAC. Gig skullduggery is cheap, fast, efficient, flexible and globally available.
Technological innovations have ushered in efficiency around hybrid war tactics against which we at present have no defenses. People are willing to burn down factories for roughly the cost of an economy seat from New York to San Francisco. Despite the fears of privacy advocates, we don’t have a Minority Report–style crime prediction engine, even if we were to throw every dollar we have at Palantir.
The social psychologist Adam Mastroianni decried “the decline of deviancy” this week, asking “Where has all the weirdness gone?” Well, it seems to me that at least some of the weirdness is flowing right here, into scams, cryptocrimes, internet-mediated independent spywars and all the rest.
Two weeks ago, the United States seized $15 billion in cryptocurrency from a “pig butchering” scam network originating in Cambodia with deep ties to China. These organizations abduct tourists and recruit overseas workers with the promise of riches, and then have them dial for dollars across an ever-evolving series of scams targeting countries all over the world. This is a form of transnational crime that was impossible even a few years ago, one that undermines political legitimacy while also conveniently siphoning dollars from the West to the rest.
What can democratic nations do to fight back? It starts with building up immunity. That means getting a grip on inequality and a tattered social safety net that pushes desperate citizens to seek out any form of lucre, legal or illegal. It also means strengthening the rule of law, police forces and criminal prosecutions to ensure culprits are brought to justice, and swiftly. We also need to improve our surveillance systems, from funding data collection and analysis tools like Palantir to building new platforms like recently de-stealthed Valthos in biodefense to foil newly-discovered threats.
Democratic countries can’t keep taking blow after blow from adversaries with nary an attempt at a hybrid-war response.
Even more importantly, though, we must respond with much better and wider education on how to be vigilant in this new era. It’s not enough to blast a 15-second pre-recorded warning to tired riders of mass transit (“See it. Say it. Sort it.”). Very few understand the complexities and tactics of state-to-state technology-enhanced terrorism and influence operations and the signs to look for. That’s one reason why most of the gig workers who sign up for these activities don’t even realize they are pawns on the global chessboard of power. That’s a critical societal weakness, but one that can be plugged with a much more robust program of education.
These immunizations need to be coupled with more direct outbound actions. Democratic countries can’t keep taking blow after blow from adversaries with nary an attempt at a hybrid-war response. That’s a breakdown of even the simplest game theory model of international relations. Instead, it’s time to augment older playbooks on undermining the authority of autocrats everywhere with a much more improvisational toolkit, one that is centered around new technologies that offer new capabilities.
We won’t undo the innovations that have spread over the past decade, but we can build new institutions to protect ourselves from their worst effects. We live in rich nations with deep resources and citizens who still — mostly — believe in the future of their countries. It’s time to take those resources and kick the vandals out.
