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release valve for the over-inflated ambitions, nationalism, and hatreds that steamed up between nations. On our modern networked systems, however, power is different. On fast connected webs of nearly any sort, tiny forces applied can have immense impacts that leap from one domain to another. One erroneous commodity trade can snap-scramble a marketplace - and then tip a bucket of chaos into nations, companies and trading firms, One hacker, sneaking into the back-door of a computer network, can - to usa term of art - “brick” a nation’s expensive security systems into devices as lively as a doorstop: STUXNET spinning Iran’s centrifuges into planned madness, for instance.’° Here’s the essential, dangerous insight about safety in a connected world: It once required a big industrial force to defeat another big industrial force. Such grinding victories required time. They could be prepared for. They could be avoided, even. No more. Even the most formidable physical structures of our world - militaries, markets, governments - can be rendered swiftly immobile by virtual attacks on their connected nerve systems.’! These strikes - or, in some cases, these accidents — baffle and then paralyze at network speed, by which I mean less time than it took you to read this sentence. When the American national security strategy speaks of a “long struggle” against terrorism or a rising China, it doesn’t acknowledge how fast some of the turns ahead may be.” Yes, a decades-long battle for control of essential networks and platforms and protocols lingers ahead. But I fear some of the changes ahead will whiplash us with their speed. Generals in World War One lamented that the whole war might have been prevented if diplomatic communication had been conducted at the stately speed of the horse-carried message. It was the damn velocity of the telegraph that baffled the judgment of statesmen, they claimed. Figures whose every instinct runs ata pace far slower than what the age demands were then - and are now - a menace. The great 20 Century theorist of political realism, Hans Morgenthau, once referred to nation states as “blind and potent monsters.”’? He felt a sort of nervous evil as he studied the moves countries made on the stage of world history. Some of this unease was surely a result of his own life, marked by a lucky escape from Germany in 1937, as Hitler was finally perfecting a national machine of lurid and murderous potency. I suspect Morgenthau would have been terrified now by the always-on, all-seeing connected mesh that encloses us. Connected forces move at times like a potent and capricious monster too, smashing businesses or national economies or ecosystems 70 One hacker: David Raymond, Tom Cross, Gregory Conti, Robert Fanelli, “A Control Measure Framework to Limit Collateral Damage and Propagation of Cyber Weapons”, Proceedings 5th International Conference on Cyber Conflict (NATO CCD COE Publications, Tallinn 2013). 71 Even the most formidable: Daniel Geer, “Heartbleed as Metaphor”, Lawfare Blog April 21, 2014 72 When the American: See 2014 US National Security Strategy 73 The great 20‘ Century theorist: Hans Morgenthau, “The State of Political Science,” Politics in the Twentieth Century Vol. 1, (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, YEAR HERE) 53 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018285