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 us a 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