Adapting Warfare to Social and
Technological Change
Some Tentative Thoughts
Bob McDaniel
Full Impact of Information
Revolution Yet to Come
• Electrification did not raise productivity until the
structure of factories changed.
• Information Revolution’s primary impact will
come only after other fundamental organizational
changes.
• We have not yet used technology to change our
essential relationship to machines, but only to
perform more efficiently existing processes.
Steam to Electricity
• Old system designed to reduce friction:
machines were grouped around a prime
mover (steam engine) - power transmitted
by belts, gears and axles.
• New system: each machine has its own
power source and, in order to facilitate the
flow of production, machines laid out in
most efficient manner to achieve that end.
Sundering of the Nation-State
• World is organizing itself into a series of
interconnected networks.
• Simultaneously, nation states find themselves torn
in two directions - upward toward international
security, trade, and social organizations and
downward by subnational movements that want
to splinter the state.
Emergence of the Small
• Empowerment of the individual entrepreneurship, free agency
• Downsizing, outsourcing, networking of
businesses
• Growth of regional and cultural consciousness
• Biotechnology - the Genome Project
• Nanotechnology - nanomachines
• Non-linear complex systems and the significance
of small events (tipping points or "points of
singularity")
The implication for small armed forces, such as Canada's,
is that a technologically capable force is now a real
possibility.
Large/Few vs. Small/Many
• In time, the large, the complex, and the few will have to
yield to the small and the many.
• Systems composed of millions of sensors, emitters,
microbots, and miniprojectiles, will, in concert, be able
to detect, track, target, and land a weapon on any
military object large enough to carry a human.
• Analysts talk about the mesh, a system of systems
including not only links between people and computers,
but also weapons systems, aeroplanes, remote cameras,
automated factories and warehouses, intelligent buildings,
hospitals, weather stations, satellites, and so on.
Parallel with the Economy
• First was the Agrarian Revolution.
• Then followed the Industrial Revolution with mass
production and mass warfare.
• If we are now in the process of transforming the
way we create wealth, from the industrial to the
informational, there is a parallel change taking
place with warfare.
• It is logical to assume the fourth generation of
war will also take its shape from society.
• Fourth-generation warfare is highly irregular.
"Asymmetric" operations — in which a vast
mismatch exists between the resources and
philosophies of the combatants. Many small
firms can outdo the giants through their agility.
• Emphasis is on bypassing an opposing military
force and striking directly at cultural, political, or
population targets. Many businesses thrive by
exploiting niches that the giants find difficult or
costly to service.
• the implementation of ‘dominating manoeuvre’ by
‘agile’ military forces deployed on a ‘just-intime’ basis parallels agile manufacturing and justin-time production systems.
Paradigm Shift
Paradigm Shift =
Machine -----> Organism
(Top down
(Bottom up
Design)
Design)
Each cell
"knows" what to
do based on its
context.
Mathematics and Change
Type of
Problem
War
Operations
Economy
Line/Area
Tactics of
line and
column
Agriculture
Calculus
Dynamics
Massed
firepower
Industrial
(Steam)
Matrix
Algebra
Complex
Linear
Manoeuvre
Assembly
Line
Fractals
Chaos
Complex
NonLinear
Swarming
E-Commerce
Mathematics
Geometry
Chaos Wars
If you look around the world today, you can list approximately
51 significant conflicts going on somewhere at any given time.
US military forces are active in about five places. But big
conflict, big war seems to be a thing of the past. Are we in a
new era of lots of persistent low-level conflicts, what could
be called the "era of chaos wars"?
Why Canadian Forces Excel
Tuesday November 27, 2001
The Guardian
"What we are looking at is chaos and ambiguity," says
Air Vice-Marshal Brian Burridge, describing what senior
officers in the military face in a world of low-intensity
warfare and collapsed states. It is their responsibility to
see that those who will be called upon to command in
these circumstances are able to cope.
Comments about the Canadian Military
From A Soviet Document: "One of the serious problems in
planning against Canadian doctrine is that the Canadians do
not read their manuals nor do they feel any obligation to
follow their doctrine."
A German General Officer: "The reason that the Canadian
Army does well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the
Canadian Army practises chaos on a daily basis."
Anonymous 1st Canadian Division Staff Officer: "If we don't
know what we are doing, the enemy certainly can't anticipate
our future actions!"
The Mesh
• Combat requires doing two things: finding targets
and hitting them (while avoiding the same fate).
• PGMs allow their possessors to hit most anything.
• Tomorrow's meshes will allow their possessors
to find anything worth hitting. Every trend in
information technology favours the ability to
collect more and more data about a battlefield,
knitting a finer and finer mesh which can catch
smaller and stealthier objects.
Dominant InfoAge Social
Structure is the Network
• Exploration of emergent social structures leads to
an overarching conclusion: dominant functions
and processes in the information age are
increasingly organized around networks.
• New information technology paradigm provides
material basis for network's pervasive expansion
throughout the entire social structure.
Hierarchy to Network
Evolution of Street Gangs
Local
International
Global
1st Generation 2nd Generation 3rd Generation
Turf Gang
Drug Gang
Mercenary Gang
Turf Protective
Market
Penetration
Power/Financial
Acquisition
ProtoNetWarrior
Emerging
NetWarrior
NetWarrior
Citizen Activists
• Ordinary citizens have used the handheld video
camera, the telephone, the fax and other
communications technologies to make their
causes known: Philippines, South Africa, Zapatistas,
ban landmines movement.
• Anti-WTO activists in Seattle were systematic,
well-organized and well-funded. Using modern
communications, including the Internet, they
were able to execute simultaneous actions by
means of pulsing and swarming tactics
coordinated by networked and leaderless
"affinity groups".
Empowering Disparate Groups
• A new generation of communications satellites
will inexpensively link virtually every part of the
globe. Importantly, one report noted that for
"disadvantaged regions of the world . . . The
coming satellite communications revolution could
be one of those rare technological events that
enable traditional societies to leap ahead."
Decline in Distinction Between
Military and Civilian
The distinction between war and peace will be
blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear,
possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields
or fronts. The distinction between "civilian" and
"military" may disappear.
Civilian/Police Counter-Terrorism
• Los Angeles has set up a Terrorism Early Warning
Group (TEW), a hybrid organization blending
networked organizational features with traditional
government structures: law enforcement, fire
services and health authorities at all levels of
government.
• TEW serves as a mechanism for monitoring terrorist
trends and potentials, and rapidly disseminating
alerts and warnings.
• TEW uses an "intelligence toolbox" consisting of
virtual reachback to technological specialists and
advanced methodologies to help project consequences.
A New Mode of Conflict
• Cyberwar means operating in small, dispersed
units, so well internetted that they can
coordinate, coalesce, and then disperse
again in repeated swarming attacks.
• Initially, light ground units infiltrate and
take up dispersed positions. As areas
cleared, helicopter insertions made more
frequently.
• Units may then act as scouts and guides
(sensors), calling in accurate air, artillery
and missile fire on multiple targets.
Ever since the end of the Cold War Western forces
have lagged in developing the correct military
response to 4GW—a response that calls for reliance
on smaller units versed in manoeuvre warfare. This
kind of fighting eschews heavy firepower, attrition,
and long-range, high-altitude bombardment. It
favours joint-service operations and close-quarters
combat involving small, fast-moving units with
lighter equipment.
In tactical terms, this means coordinating intelligence on
a global scale. It means rapier thrusts against 4GW
bases and cells, slicing up the networks linking the cells,
and taking out the fanatics who supply the brains and the
resources to conduct this kind of indiscriminate warfare.
Because the nation-state no longer holds a monopoly
on destructive force, a most important change in how
4GW is confronted is to henceforth ordain that the
sanctuary of "national sovereignty" is no longer
sacrosanct, can no longer be honoured when employed
as a facade for sheltering, endorsing and provisioning
non- national 4GW assets and formations. As in any
conflict, the military task must be to disarm the enemy
and neutralize his offensive capability, employing the
weapons and tactics appropriate for the task.
To understand the potential shape of the fourth
generation of war, we must look at the political,
economic, and social changes in society as well as the
changes in technology since the advent of the third
generation of war.
Politically the world has undergone vast changes. The
third generation of war developed when international
relations were defined in terms of the European nation
states that dominated them. In contrast, the fourth
generation of war is coming of age during a period
of exponential increase in the number and type of
players on the international scene.
Emergence of Netwar
• Conflicts will increasingly be "netwars" or
clashes involving networks rather than
traditional, hierarchical adversaries.
Network of 9/11 Hijackers
Frequency Distribution of Links
Log/Log Graph of HiJacker Net
Network Analysis
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3
4
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
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2
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Bombnet is a group of social network analysts
studying the structure and potential vulnerabilities
of terrorist networks.
Netwar vs. Cyberwar
Netwar - focuses on new processes enabled by
technology (Networks: Nodes/Links)
Cyberwar - technologizes present structures.
• Cyberwar is concerned with traditional military
aspects like Command, Control, Communications
and Intelligence, also called C3I.
• Netwar refers to information-related conflict at
a grand level between nations and societies.
The Evolution of Flows and
Forces
• Melée — the primeval state of war with no discernible
organization, no need for C2, and no technologies
beyond the visual and the aural acuity of the combatants.
Aerial dogfights in both World Wars are examples.
• Massing — where written messages and primitive
signaling enabled a hierarchically organized central
authority to command and to control dispersed mass
forces, achieving maximum shock and firepower. These
tactics were last seen in attrition war on the linear
battlegrounds of World War I, World War II, and in
Korea.
• Manoeuvre — exploiting electronic communication
and sensing technologies for command and control
of complex, synchronized, multilinear operations
that surprised, penetrated and flanked, and focused on
the decisive point. These have been described as twoway technologies that turned armed forces into sensing
as well as fighting units and were most recently seen as
AirLand doctrine in operation Desert Storm.
• Swarming — "a seemingly amorphous, but
deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way
to perform military strikes from all directions …
sustainable pulsing of force or fire … from a myriad of
small, dispersed, networked manoeuvre units", and
where information and sensing technologies empower
lower level units to function more effectively without
hierarchical command levels.
Swarming
It will work best — perhaps it will only work — if it is
designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small,
dispersed, networked manoeuvre units (called "pods"
organized in "clusters").
Tactics of Swarming
Swarming can be conceptually broken into four stages:
locate, converge, attack, and disperse.
Swarming forces must be capable of sustainable pulsing:
Swarm networks must be able to come together rapidly and
stealthily on a target, then redisperse and be able to
recombine for a new pulse.
It is important that swarm units converge and attack
simultaneously. Each individual swarm unit (pod) is
vulnerable on its own, but if united with other friendly units,
overall lethality can be multiplied, because the phenomenon
of the swarm effect is greater than the sum of its parts.
Swarming + PGMs
• Vulnerability of massed formations on the ground
to airpower and WMD (Weapons of Mass
Destruction), makes the Dispersed Swarm manoeuvre
more appropriate for the future.
• Swarm units can use indirect standoff weapons
(both organic - carried on their persons - and
nonorganic - a remote asset that has to be called to)
such as missile-launched "smart" munitions or offshore
naval platforms deep in the rear.
• Shift from direct-fire to indirect-fire weapons will
improve the mobility of the individual unit on the
ground and reduce its signature.
Some Recent Examples
• The al Qaeda network recognizes the effectiveness
of swarming. It exploits the nonlinear nature of the
battle space and sees the value of attacking from
multiple directions with dispersed units.
• Small bands of widely distributed Kosovo Liberation
Army fighters and, to a lesser extent, allied special
forces, provoked the Serbs to manoeuvre and fire,
instantly making them vulnerable to being attacked
from the air.
BattleSwarm
• Cyber/netwar means operating in small, dispersed
units, so well internetted that they can coordinate,
coalesce and then dissever in repeated
swarming attacks.
• In order effectively to disorganize enemy forces, it
would require mobilizing - and deploying in
"BattleSwarm" - a force only one tenth the size of
the enemy forces.
• In a hierarchy, people are defined by the boxes
they fill on the organizational chart. In a network,
people change their roles depending on the
situation.
• Future armed forces look
like hordes of cyberMongols.
• Arrayed not in platoons or
battalions but in "clusters"
and "pods."
• Call in airstrikes and direct
cruise missiles remotely.
• Infiltrating the landscape in
copters and off-road
buggies, they float like
butterflies but sting like
sledgehammers.
Offensive Swarming
Swarming Attack Pattern
Chaos
(Hidden Order)
Break Off &
Reorganize
Maelstrom
(Pattern
Recognition)
Situational Awareness
System
“Ride the Wave”
From Mars to Minerva
• RAND Corporation researchers Arquilla and Ronfeldt
describe information as a physical property, on a par
with matter and energy.
• Derive a new conception of power, and therefore of war.
Instead of being based on material resources, from now
on power resides in relations between people, and thus in
organization. From the brute power of the god Mars we
are passing to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.
• Shift from war based on mutual capacities for destruction,
to war in which the capacity for disruption, or disorganization, assumes equal importance.
• Researchers distinguish four levels of what they call their
"vision".
• At the conceptual level, information gives form to
structure.
• A major consequence of the information revolution - the
rise of network forms of organization.
• The core of their military doctrine is the notion of
"BattleSwarm". With each combatant in contact with all
others, and unit commanders communicating with air force
commanders and with other units it should be possible to
employ fewer personnel with greater effectiveness.
• The overall strategy is what may be called "guarded
openness". The free circulation of information serves the
interests of the Allies and victory in tomorrow's wars will go
to those who can tell the best story. It will be a dirty, noholds-barred propaganda war of competing worldviews and
alternative visions of the future (Meme Wars).
Power of Mind
• Military power resides in the domain of the
mind and the will: thinking, valuing or attitude,
and insight or imagination.
• Military power can increase in effectiveness even
as it decreases in violence.
• May be called neocortical warfare.
Telematic Laws
Moore's law states that microprocessor chips will either halve in
price or double in power every 18 months.
Gilder's law states that total bandwidth of communications
systems will triple every 12 months.
Metcalfe's law explains, in global constellations such as the
Internet, the value of the network increases geometrically with the
number of people who use it.
Grosch's law held that doubling the cost of a computer
multiplied its power fourfold. Since then, the cost- performance
ratio of computers has flipped; it is greater at the lower end than
the upper end. Microprocessors deliver more mips (million
instructions per second) for the buck than their more sophisticated
mainframe or even supercomputer rivals.
Tactical Command, Control and
Communication Systems
(TCCCS)
Athene
IRIS --
[Battalion]
Situation
Awareness
System
Athene - Command & Control at the battalion and above
level for use in harsh combat conditions.
SAS- situational awareness system displays battlefield
information in real time at the Battalion Battle Group and
below level.
Situational Awareness System
• Enables the battlefield commander to track and
direct all his assets in near real-time, using
global positioning satellites (GPS).
• Instantaneous moving map manipulation and
display on a theatre-wide scale.
• Detailed maps are scanned and stored.
• Boosts by a factor of up to 25 times the amount
of geographic information available to today's
soldier on the battlefield.
Digital Mapping
• Enables commanders and planners to view maps at
the exact scale and level of detail most
appropriate to the task being considered.
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS) capabilities
allow the latest physical and objective data to be
overlaid, together with dispositions of own and
opposition resources.
• Transmit map data to operational units for local
production, on-screen viewing.
Head Mounted Display
The helmet HUD (heads-up
display) allows maps to be
displayed with relative
positions of pod mates, or
three-dimensional layouts to
be superimposed in their field
of vision. Such wearable
computers link together
components such as a radio
system, a rifle-mounted video
camera and thermal sight, and
GPS.
battleWEB Vehicle
Tactical Infosphere
• Tactical infosphere is a term for information on
demand, or information pull as opposed to push.
• SAS and Athene programmes designed to provide
a portion of the information required to fill the
infosphere.
• Almost every Canadian tactical vehicle and
selected soldiers on foot will be part of the
continuously updated database.
• In the future, enemy locations may be entered
by sensors, including soldiers, and passed
automatically throughout the system.
• Disparate pieces of information must be
integrated into a cohesive system.
• Involves pulling different types of sensor
information into this infosphere, processing this
information in different places, transporting it and
presenting it in a manner that permits a
commander to make an intelligent decision
based on the data.
Real-Time Warfare
• Knowledge army does not require co-location of cells to
plan, direct and monitor the progress of operations.
• Complete sharing of available information and using the
information-pull principle means that up-to-date
information is being added to the infosphere
continually.
• Commander and his staff will be separated
geographically so they are in the location that best
supports their individual functions.
• Video conferencing and electronic white boarding will
enable these virtual CPs to operate in real-time.
Virtual Reality Training for War
• Modified version of the popular game "Doom"
enables troops to interact and practise fairly
realistic small unit tactics and fireteam drills.
• Computer simulator makers have developed
workstations that allow company, battalion,
brigade, and even division level officers to
practise large unit engagement techniques in
realistic virtual circumstances.
• Develop interactive skills that are useful in
practising modern "Air-Land-Battle" doctrine, that
is needed in today's extremely fluid battlefield
environment.
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Computing
• By linking together hundreds of soldiers, each
equipped with a head-mounted display that
broadcasts details of a virtual environment, it
would be possible for military units to accurately
simulate various scenarios.
• Section/pod could virtually practise an attack
while out in the field, before carrying it out for
real. "Your training system suddenly becomes
your mission-planning system. Before I go attack
that hill. I'm going to run a simulation of it with
my squad over the next 10 minutes, and simulate it
virtually while we're waiting here for orders."
Information Warfare
• "Info War" is not the same as intelligence
operations, although it is clearly related to
intelligence.
• An attack on an adversary’s entire information,
command and control, and, indeed, decisionmaking system.
• Directed at shrinking or interfering with the
enemy’s Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA)
loop while expanding and improving our own.
• Planners describe the objective of information
war as "information dominance."
There are 7 different forms of Information Warfare:
(i) command-and-control warfare (which strikes against the
enemy's head and neck),
(ii) intelligence-based warfare (which consists of the design,
protection, and denial of systems that seek sufficient knowledge to
dominate the battlespace),
(iii) electronic warfare (radio- electronic or cryptographic
techniques),
(iv) psychological warfare (in which information is used to change
the minds of friends, neutrals, and foes),
(v) "hacker" warfare (in which computer systems are attacked),
(vi) economic information warfare (blocking information or
channelling it to pursue economic dominance), and
(vii) cyberwarfare (a grab bag of futuristic scenarios). All these
forms are weakly related.
Distributed Intelligence
• Most of the recent benefits of information
technology are going, not into more powerful
computers, but into more widely distributed
intelligence.
• Computers can be slaved to sensors and
networked.
Role of Unattended Sensors
• Unattended sensors in a future theatre of operation
detect enemy movements, identify and locate
targets, and feed that information via
unmanned aerial vehicle communications
network nodes to the command centre.
• Commanders collate their data with other
information from space and Allied-based sources,
then signal unattended battlefield and airborne
weapons to launch against enemy assets.
• “Precision weapons without current, precise knowledge of
target locations are pretty useless.” Sandia advocates
networking small gadgets that might package a global
positioning locator, sensor, RF communicator, and a
small computer. These relatively inexpensive devices
would be widely distributed and in contact with each other
to give a comprehensive picture of enemy movements.
• A fractal approach — small patterns that repeat larger
patterns — to integrating security will help autonomous
groups integrate data currently in separate boxes.
Targeted groups include law enforcement, intelligence,
public health, first responders, scene commanders, local
governments, and private citizens.
Information on Demand
The military is seeking ways to help soldiers on the
ground in places such as Afghanistan get
information faster. The idea is to let them establish ad
hoc computer connections with forces, say, inside
helicopters in Uzbekistan, or with officers back home
and even with allies abroad, without getting bogged
down in multiple security levels and incompatible
software systems.
Rapid Prototyping: Parts on Demand
• Today armies depend on pre-positioned supplies
or a gigantic logistics tail to provide, say, spare
helicopter parts.
• Future armies, relying on advanced computing and
"rapid prototyping," will before long be able to
make many needed items on the spot. The
technology can build objects of any desired
shape out of metal, paper, plastic, or ceramics,
according to instructions transmitted from data
bases thousands of miles away.
• This will reduce the need for permanent foreign
bases or supply depots.
Grid Technology
• Related to Rapid Prototyping will be the widespread
implementation of Internet2 technology, enabling
computer users to order computing power from the
grid.
• Super-high-bandwidth Internet2 and readily available
supercomputing power promises to deliver
applications like streamed high-definition video,
telemedicine, research collaboration, and distance
learning.
• This will facilitate "reachback", the remote contacting
of any information source, civilian or military, from the
battlefield.
Platform-Centric vs. Net-Centric
There is a parallel in the way Western forces fight battles
today and the way computing worked in the 1980s. Just as
you and your friend worked on incompatible operating
systems and software, the military operates on independent
weapons platforms. Carrier groups are platforms, as are
Leopard tanks and F-18 aircraft, each operating with their
own standards. And just as you and your friend wasted time
trying to coordinate your different platforms, military
experiments have found that platform-centric warfare
takes twice as long to destroy 50 percent fewer targets
than does network-centric warfare.
Net-Centric Warfare
Value of Netcentricity
• Allows for vast global connectivity, real-time
collaboration, and rapid and convenient
information exchange.
• It has produced a significant byproduct as well reduced costs. Moving information is far less
costly than moving people and things.
• For the individual networked soldier the numerous
elements of support: weapons, intelligence,
medical services, etc. may be viewed simply as
peripherals, to be contacted instantaneously as
required.
Netcentricity has allowed companies to downsize
while simultaneously increasing productivity. For
example, FedEx's PowerShip customer tracking
software boosted both customer volume and
satisfaction while allowing for an 80-percent
reduction in customer service representatives.
For the military, the promise of being able to mass
effects rather than forces, to leave people and
machines where they are, and to create smaller, intheatre footprints, are just a few of the benefits to be
derived from its version of netcentricity: Net-Centric
Warfare (NCW).
NCW describes how the military will organize and
fight in the Information Age. By networking sensors,
decision makers, and shooters, a shared awareness is
created, which enables faster decision-making,
higher tempo operations, greater lethality,
increased survivability, and self-synchronization.
And because NCW promises a better distribution of
resources to tasks than was possible in the past,
operations, which may have been impossible under a
traditional warfare model, might become feasible in the
future.
New Weapons and
Countermeasures
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Precision-Guided Munitions (PGMs)
Non-Lethal Weapons
Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles
Stealth Technology
Anti-Ballistic Missile System
Bluetooth and Networking of Sensing Devices
Space Technology
New Infantry Weapon
• Removable top barrel hurls 20mm high-explosive airbursting fragmentation rounds more than a half-mile. The
lower barrel shoots NATO-standard 5.56mm
ammunition. These rounds provide accurate single-round
or bursts to about 500 yards. Laser-guided electronics as
sophisticated as on a modern tank.
Lasers of Lead
• Australian inventor Mike O'Dwyer has developed a machine
gun that can fire bullets at a rate of 1 million rounds per
minute.
• Rather than use mechanical firing pins to shoot bullets one by
one, O'Dwyer's gun holds multiple bullets in the barrel -- one
behind the other.
• Electronic charges set off in different parts of the barrel, just
fractions of a second apart, fire the bullets in fast succession
using traditional gunpowder.
• The all-electronic handgun uses the technology to ensure the
gun can only be fired if its user is wearing a special ring that
emits an electronic signal. This means the gun would be
worthless if it is taken from a policeman or soldier by an
assailant.
Counter-Network Networks
Taking a cue from LA's TEW we might envision the
following elements in a military network to fight
adversary networks:
A network of modules (pods) each comprised of experts
covering all levels of expertise. Individual experts/soldiers
in contact with relevant contacts anywhere in the network.
Virtual reachback to experts in business, government and
academia in realtime.
Group software enables pods and individuals to
collaborate on plans and actions when responding to
threats.
A Role for NGOs
• Another way to boost the quality and quantity of intelligence is to
cultivate more of an open source model - by including
nongovernmental organizations, like Amnesty International, in the
network.
• This will make it possible to draw on the knowledge of activist
groups already engaged in waging social netwars around the
world.
• Adding NGOs to a sensory network will also help develop
loyalty to a cause. The al Qaeda network draws its strength from
the tight religious and kinship bonds among its members. To be
effective, the Allies' counternetwork will need to have its own
binding, democracy-driven value system.
Books on Networks