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the conditions for the practice of diplomacy in our future and, when that fails, the landscape for decisive military or economic moves. Mastery of these systems will provide a rich set of creative ways to increase our security, far more effective than the unilateral and inconclusive military force we largely turn to now. A sensibility for networks will unmask developments that look friendly as in fact deeply dangerous. It will reveal that some of what may appears a threat is in fact an key to security. But this instinct for seeing differenlty has largely not settled upon our leaders. Already the emergence of network power is producing strange collisions. Iran versus Twitter. The hacking collective Anonymous striking against Mexican drug lords, terrorists and Russian television. Tor versus the NSA. The use of financial networks to crack human trafficking webs. Biological surveillance sensors in cites used to fight disease contagion spreads — a network of machines laid against a network of bugs.®® I mean this at nearly every scale. Waves of networked autonomous armed drones, for instance, may be among the greatest tactical military threats of the next few decades; the only hope of defense against them will be still better-enabled, self-thinking and learning defensive meshes, themselves capable of response at a pace dictated by links of machine learning and communications. Writing in 1890, the great American historian and admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan, produced “The Influence of Sea Power upon History” in which he attempted to convince an age obsessed with land forces of the enduring, decisive power of armed ocean fleets. Hannibal’s smashing attacks against Rome, Mahan wrote, or Napoleon's failure against England - in each case “mastery of the sea rested with the victor.”°? Our future will bring, almost certainly, a study of the “Influence of Network Power upon History”. Here is aa line as true in diplomacy as it is in business or politics: Mastery of networks - the links of data and trade and security information and finance and others - will rest with the victor. For the most part, the order the American and European world has been accustomed to since the Treaties of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War in the 17% century bottled the power to make large-scale change inside states. Nations held a monopoly on the use of force, in a sense. They used it. Violent, state on state struggles were the defining events of global affairs. In such a world, the country with the most power, the greatest material reserves, the strongest sense of national destiny, also enjoyed the most security - and the most options. A few hundred thousand British imperial troops overmastered India in this fashion. And a handful of really powerful nations struggled over centuries for dominance of the whole system. Statesmen sought, and even occasionally achieved, temporary balances between the lurching and violent resets of wars that erupted like a sort of pressure- 68 Biological surveliance: The foundational text of network battle thinking is John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds. Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (Santa Monica: RAND, 2001). For a discussion of the biological issues, see Eugene Thacker, “Living Dead Networks”, in Fiberculture Journal No. 4 (2005) 69 Hanibal’s smashing attacks: Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660-1783 (Boston: Little, Broan & Co. 1890), iv 52 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018284