By Nina McCambridge
Last Tuesday, Professor Audrey Kurth Cronin, founding director of the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology, gave a talk related to her recent book, “Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists.” She compared “open and closed technological revolutions.”
According to Cronin, a closed technological revolution involves technologies like “nuclear weapons, battleships, satellites, jet fighters, even radar during the Second World War. These things are expensive, rare, and difficult to build. … They’re supported by long-term government programs with deep capital investment.” She characterized the majority of the 20th century in this way. On the other hand, an open technological revolution — which she says better describes our current time period — involves civilian and military technological innovations being so deeply intertwined that terms like “dual-use” become meaningless.
In response to the end of the Cold War, she said, in 1993 the U.S. “shifted from closed-off development to open development.” According to Cronin, the declining costs of microelectronics made this possible. She described how the technological revolution in the private sector was in part a policy choice of the U.S. government, with “all of these examples: ARPANET became the Internet, tax dollars developed GPS, NASA and the U.S. Air Force drove the development of microprocessors. Google built their search engine with funding from a National Science Foundation grant.” At the same time, the U.S. government forced the consolidation of military contractors in order to stabilize them for a less militaristic era.
New technologies, now public, began to diffuse to insurgents and terrorists whose military power, according to Cronin, has started to become more comparable to the power of centralized state militaries. The technologies that we have to worry about diffusing are not “the high-end technologies that the elites are building; quantum computing, those types of technologies that are in the first wave of innovation.” Rather, it’s technologies in the second or third wave of innovation — like drones and 3D printing — that are able to diffuse. Such technologies are cheap and accessible.
To draw an analogy to the present day, Cronin described an often-forgotten global terrorist movement that was a massive problem a little more than a century ago. This was the anarchist movement, during which the anarchists “killed or injured thousands of civilians and contributed to a surge of assassinations from Russian Tsar Alexander II in 1881 to the French president, the Spanish prime minister, the Italian king, and U.S. president William McKinley in 1901.” This culminated in the infamous assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The anarchists were able to do terrorism on this scale, she argued, because of the diffusion of a new technology: dynamite. Cronin showed how the terrorism in Europe subsided only after more regulations were put on the sale of dynamite after a tragic explosion in Wales. However, in America, our more libertarian government was unwilling to strictly regulate dynamite. Eventually, the market came to the rescue: weary of explosions on their trains, the train companies came up with their own dynamite regulations, which effectively applied to all dynamite being transported across state lines. Then, the wave of anarchist terror calmed in the Western world.
Cronin described another technology that enabled decentral warfare — the AK-47, or Kalashnikov, which “became the most widely dispersed firearm in history, outstripping its closest competitor, the American M16, by five or 10 times. … Today, there are between 70 and 100 million Kalashnikovs throughout the world.” This rifle was originally kept secret by the Soviet army — the first photograph of an AK-47 is of a revolutionary who had taken it off a dead Soviet soldier — but it was widely diffused because the Soviets, having no internationally useful currency, often paid other countries with AK-47 factories. Knowledge of how to build the rifle, and the ability to privately purchase or capture the rifle, quickly diffused across the world. This rifle became a powerful symbol of insurgency — Cronin mentioned how Osama bin Laden was never seen in a photograph without his AK-47. According to Cronin, before World War II, insurgencies won against state armies around a quarter of the time, but since then, they have been winning against state armies at least 40 percent of the time — and this is largely thanks to the AK-47.
Cronin also discussed how the widespread tech-savviness of the Ukrainian population has allowed them to be much more successful against the Russian army than one would expect from doing a traditional evaluation of the military strength of two nations. She also attributes a large portion of their success to the Diia app, which allows Ukraine to maintain transparent governance even under stress. Cronin rejected a hard distinction between lethal and non-lethal technology, because now more than ever, all technology can be connected.
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