Illustrative Examples	Reasons for Terrorism	Role of Media
	History of War	Terrorism's New Rules	Solutions
	Role of Democracy	Tools of Terror

John Muirless was about to make one last phone call before his flight.  He had just spent 18 months with a small band of operatives working in a dozen countries.

His colleague in Panama was anonymously sending faxes from a public service to 24 news organizations around the world.  Their militant group, the Gaia Warriors, sought to save Gaia, the earth, from destruction by one of its evil species, humans.  The rising world population coupled with increased consumption had already stripped the planet of its topsoil, its ozone, its rain forests.  Four hundred species a day were disappearing.

John knew he would never again see his basement office in the First Interstate building—Los Angeles’ tallest-where he had a short term lease.  He thought about the filing cabinets packed with C-4 plastic explosives shipped to him in air-tight plastic bags by his colleague in Bonn.  A tiny wire went behind a desk into the back of a desktop computer; another wire led out of that computer, and plugged directly into the worldwide telephone grid.

John scrolled through his auto telephone dialer.  “Atlanta:  c&s Plaza,” “Chicago:  Sears Tower,” “Frankfurt:  Messe Turm,” “Hong Kong:  Bank of China,” “London:  Natwest Tower,” “New York:  World Trade Center,” “Paris:  Tour Elf Aquitaine,” “Tokyo:  Ikebukuro Office Tower,” “Sydney:  mlc Centre,” “Toronto:  cn Tower.”  He pictured each one, with its heavy filing cabinets, telephone, computer.  He didn’t even know the names of his counterparts; they thought it better to build “firewalls” of protection between them in case one got caught.  Only John knew the details of how extensive their network had grown, and they took every precaution not to be traced.

John punched the auto-dial code to his office computer, took a deep breath, punched a second code to activate the system, and hung up. As he casually walked toward his plane to Rio, he calmly took the batteries out of his auto-dialer, erasing all records of names and telephone numbers, and tossed it into the trash.

As the plane taxied down the runway, John looked at his watch.  Hong Kong’s 1,209-foot tall Bank of China building would be completely flattened within three minutes.  For the next three hours, horror would sweep the world.  Every fifteen minutes for the next three hours, a monument of capitalism would turn into a twisted rubble of steel, concrete, glass and flesh.

John looked forward to his meeting in Brazil to plan their next assault.

^{____________________}

Jokar Ausmiyev had the straps of his rucksack fastened snugly around his shoulders.  His load was much lighter than when he left the Berlin, carrying a few apples and four plastic bottles of  “drinking” water for the journey.

He dropped the first bottle 20 minutes into the Chunnel as he passed from one train car to the next.  The contents seeped under the black vinyl floor cover where the wagons connected, spreading the colorless liquid over five of ten miles of train track, deep under the Strait of Dover, connecting England and France.

In London, he let the second bottle leak from his hand as he walked the length of tunnels connected to the King’s Cross subway station.  It was linked to the Victoria, Northern, Metropolitan, Piccadilly and Circle lines:  tens of thousands of commuters passed through that point each day.

Jokar caught the next train to Charing Cross for his third bottle.  He was one of the last members of the Zikr Gazavat, a splinter group of the Chechen Army seeking to gain international support in their autonomy from Russia.  Each water bottle contained a sugary syrup with 50 grams of concentrated Pulmonary Anthrax, Type e, a genetically mutated form of Bacillus anthracis for which there was no known cure. 

Nearly every person who passed through the Chunnel, and any of the miles of tubes connected to Charing or King’s Cross over the next three days, would likely suffer hidden blisters and pussy cankers in their lungs within days.  The scabs would spread to the lips and ears, and within weeks, 95 percent of those infected would be dead.  The underground tunnels were perfect, because with each passing train, the invisible spores were pumped throughout the network of tunnels.  He hoped that within a day every seat in the system would be infected.

Each person would carry the highly virulent bacteria on his or her clothes, to their offices, churches and homes.  They would spread it on busses, through coins and bills and the hands they touched, the children they hugged.  The disease would travel silently throughout the island, completely undetected.  Yet in two weeks, over 100,000 English men, women and children, including Jokar, would be dead.

He smiled as the train lurched to a stop at Paddington Station, his last bottle of anthrax on his back.  Jokar had never accomplished much in life; he relished the idea of finally doing something worthwhile.

^{____________________}

In Kinneret, Mohammed al-Hussien, age 23, picked out a small fishing boat with a sturdy electric motor.  On this clear day, he could easily see the Golan Heights across the Sea of Galilee.  This was the first time he had ever been to Israel, or even seen the occupied territory of Syria.

Unemployed in Tunis, he looked forward to adventure in Israel.  The decadent West and the destabilizing force of Israel were responsible for the hardship of his family because they were the enemies of Allah.  Mohammed believed that Allah was punishing Tunisia with a drought because it had not done enough to fight the forces of Satan.

Beneath his boat, the water was cool and clear.  He pulled the detailed map out of his vest pocket, and skillfully spied the shore with his binoculars and compass.  Casting several times, mapping the direction of water currents at different depths, he maneuvered the boat here and there before dropping anchor. 

He slowly dropped his tackle box over the side, watched it sink to exactly eight feet, and float slowly in the currents toward the intake to the Kinneret-Negev Conduit.  Within 30 minutes, the box would dissolve releasing a demitasse of very fine plutonium dust, the most toxic chemical known to man.  It would forever shut down vital aqueduct that clenched the thirst of six million people.

^{____________________}

In the Placeless Society ahead, the classical rules of warfare will forever change.  Wars won’t be fought to control territory, and the idea of a military “front” will become passé.  Aircraft carriers and rocket systems, “Star War” defense systems and thermonuclear bombs will be largely useless.  The giant military machines of the last half century will become anachronistic and useless.

With the means of warfare, the purpose will also change.  State governments will face new foes armed with technical knowledge and once exotic materials.

The guerrilla and terrorist wars of the future will ignore the primacy of national boundaries and the distinction between soldier and civilian.  Their most powerful weapon will prove to be raw fear.

 

In the decades ahead, military planners will have to throw away their two-dimensional war maps, and face a new form of tribal warfare devoid of clear-cut lines.  The future battle plans are more likely to resemble the genocide of the former Yugoslavia, the anarchy of Sierra Leone and Somalia, the assassinations and explosions in Cairo, Algiers and Caracas, the street fighting in Chechnya, the arson and looting of the Los Angeles riots.

Until the close of the 20^th century, power and wealth were defined by territory, on which one controlled the raw materials, had access to laborers and to markets.  The larger the domain of one’s hegemony, the better.

But the Placeless Society threatens to collapse the very motivation and objectives of armed conflict as we have known them throughout history.  As labor, raw materials and capital no longer unlock the doors of wealth, territory is no longer key.  In our global economy, tiny countries have an equal footing with the giants. 

It is no accident that today’s largest empires, Russia, China, India, are among the poorest on a per-capita basis, even though they control nearly half the world’s landmass.  Even the us has overextended its empire:  the cost of military hardware and personnel to maintain a global reach can exceed its return, in time impoverishing the nation.  This is what Paul Kennedy calls “imperial overstretch.”  We now understand that the two former superpowers of our era raced down the wrong track.  They invested in territorial hegemony instead of raw productive horsepower in accordance with the new rules of wealth.

We live in an inverted world that Alexander the Great, Caesar and Napoleon would not recognize:  the richest countries are among the smallest.  Size of a nation is no longer a key to prosperity. 

In the new economic order, wealth is created not by acquisition of territory, but by the proper application of human knowledge.  The us would have little to gain from taking over Mexico.  Germany would gain little by annexing Poland; Japan would lose by acquiring China.  In each case, globocorps already have access to human capital, resources and markets, without the attendant liabilities of national medicine, education and social security.  A country can gain far more by lowering tariff barriers than through military conquest.  No longer is sheer bulk an advantage.

We now know that the quantity of economic activity is not as important as its quality.  Pakistan has a gnp compara­ble to New Zealand’s, but with 33 times as many people doing the work.  What counts is not the value added, but the value added per person.  This in turn depends on education, infrastruc­ture (communications, roads, utilities) and policies (taxes, business regulations)—not size.  The five countries with the highest per-capita income are Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg—not the us, Germany, Japan, France and Italy.  The two largest countries, China and India, are among the poorest.

In the global economy, even dwarf-sized nations have equal access to raw materials, markets and technology.  Communications tie them into the global fabric.

Large size may even be detrimental.  While a factory owner in Kansas City becomes complacent in a large national market, his counterpart in Taipei, Seoul and Helsinki has to study global markets.  The countries with the fastest growth rates are often the ones looking outside their borders.

Today, why would a nation state risk war to defend the dignity of a globocorp that has most of its operations abroad, mostly foreign employees and markets, and pays the majority of its taxes in foreign lands? 

Where Japan failed in its military attempt to control Eastern Asia, it has accomplished through its globocorps five decades later.  Germany also lost the “battle” of World War ii, but in retrospect won the war as an economic juggernaut on the world stage.  In the global economy, one no longer needs to control territory to have access to its fruits.  Wars over territory will continue in the early 21^st century, but will be confined to those parts of the world still untouched by the Fourth Dimension.  A placeless world has no use for fighting over place.

Placelessness is also changing another dynamic of war.  It has been said that no major wars in the 20^th century have been started by democracies. At best, a victorious war may help a politician win reelection.  More often than not, the placelessness of television brings blood, refugees and destruction into the living rooms of too many everyday folks.  For a “television democracy” to be the aggressor in any long-term protracted war, the reasons have to be compelling, and such reasons are increasingly rare. 

And placelessness is making democracy difficult to avoid the world over.  The long-term trends favor democratic principals, especially where the Fourth Dimension is already blossoming.  Power used to be a secret chessboard where only a few knew how to move the pieces.  The ubiquity of information in our present society has unmasked the mysteries behind power.  We now know our leaders more intimately, the names of their lovers, their tax scandals, their election-time motives behind foreign-policy moves.  A public appearance, a speech, a meeting, a shuffle in high-level appointments is there for all to see.  The leader thus stripped naked is weaker in many ways, more given to democratic pressures, more accountable for his actions.

 

In the Placeless Society, the thirst for democracy is heightened, the greed for territorial expansion lessened, and the horrors of war more public.  By all accounts then, the borders of the nation-state ought to be more secure than ever.

Yet, as we will now see, a new set of challenges are rising just as the old demons seem conquered.  If left unchallenged, they may pull every corner of the world into an epoch of unmatched brutality, destruction and human suffering.

The new wars will be placeless, without boundaries, without battle fronts, fleets of ships at sea, columns of soldiers and tanks.  Intercontinental ballistic missiles will be of little value, satellites beaming lasers to and fro entirely frivolous.  The wars of the 21^st century will be fought in our streets as new pressures, alliances, technologies and the mobility of personnel bring a complete realignment to this thing called “war.”

What are the conflicts just ahead?

We have described the “world” moving into the Fourth Dimension as a land of Everything-Everywhere, full of new opportunities for the innovative—a sort of happy never-never land.

In reality, while most of us in rich countries will be thrust forward into the 21^st century, the vast bulk of humanity will be left far behind.  The “disenfranchised” will fail to grasp the lifeboat of technology; worse, their living standards will continue to erode dramatically.

The reasons stem from the great limit of wealth discussed earlier—the environment. 

In a debate raging since the 1960s, the neo-Malthusians claim that population growth will outstrip the world’s capacity to produce while the non-Malthusians argue that technology will save all.  We now understand that they are both right.  Regions that have embraced technology continue to be too productive in their ability to create food.  They are already working on the next phase of food production:  how to make apples redder, how to make strawberries sweeter.  The basic problem of having enough apples and strawberries is no longer an issue.

But the bulk of humanity will not enjoy the cornucopia of the Fourth Dimension.  Recent events have made the argument of the neo-Malthusians just too compelling to ignore.

A drive down the coast of Guinea yields an ugly sight:  zinc roofed shacks assembled from rusted shipping containers, bits of wire and cardboard.  In the streets of rutted mud, garbage is strewn, mosquitoes breed, children have protruding bellies and scant clothing.  The muck beach exposes an abandoned car here, a dead rat there.  While the population is projected to double by the next generation, entrepreneurs are stripping the forest of hardwood as precious topsoil is washing into the sea.  With average incomes scarcely more than a dollar a day, the people keep borrowing from the next generation.

No wonder that in nearby Sierra Leone, all sense of order has broken down.  The “nation-state” government controls the capital by day, but by night, bands of looters roam free.  Half a million Sierra Leoneans are displaced, half as many have fled to neighboring Guinea and Liberia, even as half a million Liberians have fled to Sierra Leone. 

Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is happening in much of Africa:  the collapse of the nation-state.  In Somalia and Rwanda, where the gunshots are the sounds of a people at war with themselves, there is no battle “front,” no attack from without, just a placeless chaos cutting from within.

The underlying stress springs from too many people on a land depleted of topsoil, arable water and open air.  Aids and resistant strains of malaria and hepatitis weaken an already broken people.  Most of Africa is a time-bomb set to explode within half a generation, with perhaps more human misery than has existed in all prior wars.  And Africa may be only the harbinger of a Second World forgotten in technology’s wake.

While it is easy to discount Africa as “over there,” it would be a mistake for rich countries to be at all smug.  The cruel reality is that the radical change occurring in our rich societies as technology marches forward is rather like a crashing surf:  a minority catches the wave and rides it, the vast majority gets buried in the wave and ground into the sand.

Those embracing fundamentalist Islam are striving to maintain their dignity in a world that has passed them by, and they are not alone.  Throughout Europe and the Americas, technology displaces workers, or leaves them with nothing to do.  In the Placeless Society, they are pitted against one another in a global pool.  The under-educated ginger-farm worker in Sierra Leone will do little better in Frankfurt, Chicago or Taipei, because his skills are not needed anywhere.

In the First World regions, those who have no significant skills are competing head to head with their counterparts in the Second World.  In the Age of Everything-Everywhere, the Second World is no longer a place that one can circle on a map, but a group of people, spread throughout the globe.

The Second World is already present in one of the richest countries on earth:  the 1992 riots in Los Angeles were not caused by the Rodney King trial; that was only the fuse.  The underlying problem was social deprivation, joblessness, discrimination, poverty, urban decay—a Second World people isolated in a First World country.  Within an hour, Los Angeles became a microcosm of Sierra Leone:  utter lawlessness, looting, arson, beatings.  White against Black against Korean against Latino, the whole fabric of society unveiled its underlying fragility.

Within hours, television coverage of Los Angeles spread the condition to Las Vegas, New York City and Miami.  Within a week, Toronto, Canada flared with white, black and Asian youths on a rampage.  In Nigeria, rioters torched government buildings and banks protesting inadequate public transportation.  Panama’s Colon was ablaze for two days with 3,500 demonstrators demanding government action against a collapsing city infrastructure.  In our electronic world, a fuse set in one city can trigger aftershocks all over the globe.  Distance and borders no longer provide a firewall against the spread of ideas.

In such an environment, tribal affiliations crystallize.  With the rich technocrats against the poor and unskilled, the enthused environmentalists against the polluting capitalists, the fundamentalist Christians and Muslims against the decadent majority (and each other), the Serbs against the Bosnians, the Black and Brown against White and Yellow, abc against xyz, the world becomes Sierra Leone.

The challenge of the Placeless Society will be to bring all of humanity to the same table, for the rich to pull all of society forward.  It is essential not just for altruistic reasons but out of self-interest as well:  at stake is social order, without which the promises of the Fourth Dimension cannot be realized.  The reasons lay in the reality of warfare in the 21^st century… terrorism.

 

The power of terrorism was demonstrated a few minutes after 10:00 p.m. on May 21, 1991, in India.  Rajiv Gandhi—the lead candidate to become the prime minister of India’s 850-million people, was killed by a Tamil separatist.  The man who was to lead the world’s largest democracy was “eliminated” by a flower girl with a blue denim belt. Three thousand miles away, another demonstration of terrorism was made against the us Marines stationed at a barracks near the Beirut international airport.  One October morning, a two-and-a-half ton truck crashed into the lobby of what the Marines jokingly called the “Beirut Hilton.” The four-story building “disappeared” into a crater 40 feet and nine feet deep, in what the fbi later called the largest non-nuclear explosion ever.  Two hundred forty-one Marines were killed. 

The us, with trillions of dollars invested in military hardware, intercontinental ballistic missiles, thermonuclear bombs, submarine and aircraft carriers, spy satellites, squadrons of fighter aircraft, and an armed forces of over two million personnel, were turned out of Lebanon by one man in a yellow truck.

With such victories against such improbable odds, who among us is safe when a death warrant is issued by an enemy tribe?  How can society protect itself?

We often discount terrorists as fringe groups of lunatics who kill indiscriminately.  But these groups know exactly what they want, and often get it.  Politicians deliver public speeches against giving in to terrorists; yet in the back rooms, they yield arms or cash, or think twice before announcing policies likely to arouse terrorists’ passions.

The new reality is that terrorism is a war fought among conflicting tribes in a placeless society.  Over the centuries of armed conflict, states have developed a “civilized” set of rules for killing each other that has become “international law”:  no attacks on civilians, no hostages to enforce agreements, no bombing of hospitals, no attacking of neutral territory, no wanton destruction of cultural or religious property, no pillage or rape or torture, no killing of captives, and no biological warfare (yet atomic bombs are acceptable). 

Terrorists argue that these rules were made for the convenience of the nation-state.  In the terrorist wars, anything goes, any means justifies the ends.  And worst of all, the technologies of placelessness favor the highly mobile terrorist-warrior over the nation-state.  Today’s new technologies give a small band of terrorists an unprecedented power that can affect millions of people with a single act.  The worst may be yet to come.

 

The ultimate weapon, whose power stayed even the superpowers, is the atomic bomb.  Its design involves billions of dollars of research and testing, significantly limiting membership in the “nuclear club.” 

But knowledge has a way of diffusing, and what is learned cannot be “unlearned.”  What started with the us and then the Soviet Union, has expanded to France, the uk, and China, followed by India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Libya, Algeria, Argentina, Brazil and South Africa.  All have either completed a nuclear bomb or have programs to develop one.  Revelations about Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War illustrate that, for all the international monitoring and export controls, a country determined to build a nuclear bomb can do so, virtually without detection.

The design of the atomic bomb is no longer a secret.  Pakistan and Iraq demonstrated how easy it was, in the global economy, to bypass export controls.  China has provided information freely to Pakistan, and Russian scientists are employed today in Libya and Algeria.

Even plutonium, the most toxic chemical known to man, is entering the Age of Everything-Everywhere.  International authorities are just unable to plug every possible leak from among a thousand nuclear sites around the world; 100 pounds of plutonium are already missing.  Russia has one to two million pounds of weapons-grade plutonium and enriched uranium, over hundreds of sites.  All that is needed for a good bomb are a few pounds; for a Hiroshima repeat, just a few ounces.  How do we know that there is not, right now, a nuclear bomb set up in a van snaking through the narrow streets of Tokyo, or in the trunk of a taxi in Washington, dc, or in a private “office” in Paris?

Terrorist organizations already have significant amounts of bomb-grade plutonium because it has turned up in government raids.  If just a few grams of highly-toxic plutonium (or even readily available cobalt-60 or iodine-131) had been included in the World Trade Center bombing, it may have rendered New York’s financial district uninhabitable for generations.

But terrorists need not resort to atomic exotica to make a point.  As early as 1972, us agents uncovered nearly 100 pounds of botulin, a powerful toxin that strikes the victim dead in micro-gram quantities.  Pulmonary anthrax kills 99 percent of the people it infects, and can be grown safely in one’s garage.

The advent of genetic engineering multiplies the risks of biological warfare a thousand-fold in the 21^st century.  Imagine a version of the lethal hiv virus as contagious as the common cold.  Imagine bacteria that exacerbate hereditary diseases endemic only to certain “racial” groups like sickle cell anemia (Blacks), Tay-Sachs disease or Niemann-Pick disease (European Jews).  Think of a virulent airborne virus that would kill all in its path, except those inoculated.  Would not a fanatical antiabortionist delight in “perfuming” abortion centers?  Would not a national airline be shut down after a thousand deaths were attributed to its flights?  Because of recirculating air conditioners, everyone in the us Congress, the Tokyo stock exchange, the un building could be infected before anyone knew what happened.  How do you stop that which you cannot see?

“Bio-terrorism” need not even be high tech to work.  California’s rich agricultural industry has been repeatedly set back by the Medfly epidemic.  Although officials like to keep it secret, there is strong evidence that a few individuals calling themselves “the Breeders” are growing Medflies on rotten fruit and releasing them by the box load to protest California’s agricultural practices.  This results in tens of millions of dollars in crop losses, and periodic bans on California’s exports all over the world.

Terrorists worldwide have access to a whole playpen of paraphernalia.  It is no longer difficult to purchase Stinger hand-held rockets that allow the user to knock out an airplane with virtually no training.  Computer viruses pulse through the global computer webs each day with a new mutation, making them ever more difficult to detect.  “Liquid metal embattlement” (lme) agents applied on metal with a felt-tipped pen, cause critical parts on trucks, aircraft or bridges to snap under stress.  Now widespread plastic explosives like C-4, are so powerful that a simple manila envelope powered by a tiny watch battery, can send a mighty 747 and the 405 individuals on board, indiscriminately cartwheeling to the ground.

 

But for all the sophisticated tools, placelessness is the terrorists’ best friend.  It allows airplanes to take them anywhere to stage their attack.  It allows their money, information and ideas to flow through our banking system and electronic networks. 

The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed all 259 passengers, involved an electronic detonating device made in Switzerland, purchased by Libya, checked into the “airline grid” in Malta, transferred to Germany, retransferred to England to an American jet which blew up over Scotland.  And of course, the passengers were from everywhere.  More Americans and Europeans were killed in this budget operation than in the Gulf War.

The new armies move undetected among us, through our borders, our aircraft and subways.  They watch our sports arenas, concerts and theaters, drive over the aquaducts and bridges that feed our cities.  The easy spread of knowledge and materials, the rich coffers of today’s global tribes, give them the means to deliver on any promise.  For each roadblock a government erects, the terrorists have a thousand options.  With their technology, it takes but one warrior to harm the many.

More important than the placelessness of terrorist movement and destruction is the placelessness of knowledge of the act—through satellites and television..

For any act of destruction committed, the promise of more to follow injects the most fear into men’s hearts.  When the World Trade Center was bombed, when Pan Am 103 fell over Lockerbie, or nerve gas attacked Tokyo’s subways, or a car bomb exploded in Oklahoma City, television reproduced the event a million times, replaying it over and over, allowing each of us to touch the victims, to hear the cries of family members.

If the business of terrorists is terror, there is no better conduit, no greater amplifier than television.  It tells each of us that we may be next:  the next flight we take, the next building we enter, the next aspirin we take or glass of water we drink.

Television drives terrorists to seek the daring and spectacular.  In the Placeless Society, professional terrorists may act like Madison Avenue media experts looking for the perfect timing, the exact vehicle and the most dramatic execution.  The numbing aspect of television will drive each terrorist group to outdo the latest horrendous act, or else risk losing the world’s top billing.

Placelessness—the ability to move undetected, the ubiquity of tools of destruction, and access to our minds to instill fear—is what gives terrorists potency.  Former us Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger labeled assassinations, kidnappings and terrorism, the “most immediate threat to free-world security” over the decades just ahead.

 

The terrorist problem is not one easily solved because in the end, it relies not on technology or resources, but on the spectacular.  As we tighten airport security, can we also do the same at every building, schoolroom, bus, movie theater?  Can we protect every politician and business executive from assassination?  Or their spouses or children from being kidnapped?  At some point, the cost of protecting a lamppost from getting vandalized is more than the lamppost is worth, and unfortunately, society has to limit how much it can spend to protect even innocent children.

The incidence of terrorism is likely to rise over the next few decades as people in the First World advance, while many in the Second World slip further behind.  Pressures on the environment will pit naturalists against industrialists.  Wanton consumerism will pit fanatic spiritualists against capitalists.  In the new millennium, doomsday cults will emerge all over the world with a message of Armageddon—and seek to bring about their own prophesies of mass murder and suicides.  The pressures of change—for all of us—will pit neighbor against neighbor.  The fault lines of conflict will no longer be along geographic borders, but within us, tearing at civilization.

Then what is to be done?  It is not clear that the nation-state of old can react as the battle is not against the state but within it.  The future may look like Colombia where the central government bowed to the powerful drug cartels, obliging a frustrated citizenry to form “death squads” to help out the police.

Perhaps the nation-state has grown too bureaucratic and inflexible to deal with this new nimble foe:  the terrorists roam the world while the arm of the state affected is short.  The state seeks to follow the “civilized” rules of warfare while terrorists ignore the distinction between civilian and soldier in indiscriminate slaughter.  The 21^st century will likely see governments “subcontracting” independent hit squads seeking to attack terrorists on their own level:  assassinations, mysterious explosions, kidnappings.

We will also see governments dealing closer with other governments to exchange information and round up suspects for extradition.  There may well be strain placed on individual liberties regarding access to travel, free passage, the seizure of goods, the tapping of phones, the scrutiny of electronic payments in the digital age.  “Mainstream” media may voluntarily censor the “who” and the “why.”  We will each be placed in a Faustian bargain, trading off freedom from terrorism for freedom from government surveillance.

Private security services will boom.  Researchers are already looking for new materials to make concrete and glass more shock resistant.  Special censors will abound, searching for molecules that burn, explode or radiate; or instruments that cut or shoot.  Businesspeople will more often wear suits and drive cars reinforced with Kevlar.  Police departments will train special quick-response “commando” units.  The distinction between war and crime will become obsolete.

For all these changes, the nation-state will lose its most compelling raison d’être, to protect its people from the military threat of other nation-states.  In the placeless warfare of the 21^st century, we will more likely find nation-states working with nation-states, as placeless bands of terrorists, or tribal affiliations slice through once-rigid national boundaries.

As we see next, the rising weight of terrorism will be the last straw to snap the back of the once mighty nation-state.