War for the New Century

So. Heard of Henry Okah?

Probably not. But he’s invented a new paradigm for waging war, straight out of a science fiction novel.

The guy puts his army together from another country by cellphone, as if it were a flash mob. He has his own merchant marine to carry off his hijacked bunker crude, his own arms company to sell guns to his own army, and a thirty-billion-dollar business, funded by petroleum mostly stolen from Royal Dutch Shell and the Nigerian government. By disrupting the economy, he weakens his enemies by the same degree that he is empowered himself.

Call him thug or terrorist or freedom fighter, he’s leveraged 21st Century technologies into a brand new way of making war.

He’s in prison now, and unlikely to see freedom anytime soon, but you can’t as easily put a new paradigm behind bars.

This might be as powerful a model for future asymmetric warfare as the IRA example was for, say, al-Qaeda.