I wish that the author had gone into detail defining exactly what he meant by networking in war. I assume he wants us to go purchase his book to find out.

Once again I note a great deal of oversimplification of both this theory and the current situation. One of the reasons for why so many soldiers are wanted is that A. a large number of soldiers are needed to support one another and B. a certain number are needed to properly police an area. One can hardly expect to actually control a nation the size of Iraq with a force of less than 100,000 (which is what Rumsfeld originally wanted). Yes, I know that counterinsurgency doesn't rely on superior numbers, but counterinsurgencies also require for soldiers to have a presence or they can't try to protect anyone.

On Iraqis and flanking, the writer ignores the fact that there never was an order for the Iraqis to melt away and start an insurgency. The Iraqi soldiers deserted, and the insurgents (who certainly never numbered 400,000) didn't start fighting until after the conventional war was over and the U.S and co made a mess of nation-building.

On Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia, yes they did try that. It failed so horribly that most of the organization had to flee to Yemen.

On Russia and Georgia, the author again ignores the fact that the Russian military actually made a pretty poor showing, shooting down several of its aircraft and suffering casualties they shouldn't have. Russia will probably remain stronger than any other Eastern European nation, but analysis suggests that even with their cutbacks the Western nations could still win the wars that only thirty years ago most people assumed the U.S.S.R would win.

Finally, on insurgencies I get the feeling that he is focusing on the wrong thing. When he talks of 'finding' the enemy he forgets that finding them is not the point. The point is to protect the population and to convince the population that your side is the best. Smaller numbers hunting the enemy isn't the best way to do that.

Do his ideas have some merit? Yes. I could see applying those tactics to some of the African conflicts that are driven more by the greed of warlords than by ideology. However, in the ideological conflicts of the Middle East and Central Asia we have to try something else.

I have been reading his papers since he proposed netwar and swarming. On theory, they are very appealing but to put an organization into being which could apply this doctrine would be tough. However as a professional military person, I think he is right. We need to build armies composed of smaller units for winning this war. How to do this and where to start is a million dollar question

sorry for irrelevant subject in last post. what i wanted to say was that this netwar has been explained in a manner that it can be moulded as per unfolding events. this is an amorphous idea but still lacks some hard core definition on which we can assign responsibilities, charter of duties and setup an organization. I am sure US Navy netwar command would be another bureaucratic stovepipe

A quote from the excellent book by Jon Parshall and Tony Tully, Shattered Sword, about the Battle of Midway. The passage deals with the war games and map exercise the Japanese Navy ran prior to the battle.

"... it shortly became clear the Yamamoto and his staff were engaged in being actively disingenuous. The character of the games was established early on when an officer in charge of playing the Red Forces (representing the American Navy) submitted a course of action that closely resembled the tactics that would be used by the Americans in the actual battle. Having shown up sooner that anticipated, while the invasion of Midway was in process, Red proceeded to attack Nagumo's flank. The Japanese carriers were heavily hit,and the invasion was placed in great difficulties. At this juncture, the table judge demurred, asserting that such American tactics were impossible, and reversed the damage to three Japanese carriers. Despite the emotional supplications of the Red player, his plea was overturned and his tactics were recast along lines more keeping with Yamamoto's vison as to when and where the foe should show himself.

In a second incident, the Japanese side was playing through the ramifications of an attack by American land-based aircraft against Nagumo's force. The table judge, Lt. Commander Okumiya Masatake, rolled dice to determine that nine hits had been scored, resulting in both Akagi and Kaga being sunk. Ugaki (Yamamoto's chief of staff) the personally intervened to revise the number of hits downward to three, leaving Kaga the sole victim of the American attack. Later in the exercise, Kaga was allowed to reappear as a participant in the follow-up operations against Fiji and New Caledonia."

If you know the participants of the recent US Navy exercise, please pass this book along.

SFXWhalen

1. From a top-down optic, this topic to a very large degree had been covered by numerous German strategians and tacticians about 90 years ago. They advocated numerous and autonomous combined-arms units that operated with violence and initiative. The result was that inferior technology (Panzer Is and IIs) encircled and gobsmacked the better-armed though slower and reactive tanks of the Allies for several years. Attacking the logistical and C3 nodes = schwerpunkt. Want to win? Find the schwerpunkt. Good luck. Your politics and mileage may vary.

2. Using maneuver is nothing new. "Swarming" is a fancy 2.0 term for "using initiative." Okay, I'm being a little cheeky, but you get the idea. Regrettably, the opposition to initiative in the US military is institutional; it has been ingrained into the psyche of the US Army for decades, despite its disadvantages. Harping to soldiers about AR 670-1, when they should be reading Sun Tzu or TE Lawrence is an example of this. How about learning 10 phrases in Arabic or Pashto instead?

3. The manpower shortage is also humorous. Different-sized units is not the answer; taking the thousands of underutilized soldiers sitting around Camp Victory making PowerPoint presentations and doing other random chores that have nothing to do with warfighting and getting them outside the wire might be. Having E-7s patrolling bases monitoring traffic violations and parking infractions would be another example of wasted personpower.

4. Get rid of the Pizza Huts, near-bear, ice cream, and other crap that eats-up resources... crap, I'm on a rant. Out.

I don't think the author has fully thought-out the consequences of his own advice. Q: How would one win the initial stages of an air war over China or Taiwan with a network of small swarming vessels? A: You can't, not without aircraft carriers, and without winning the air war the naval forces are sitting ducks.

There's a good reason Adm. Cebrowski didn't take your advice. Swarming is a complemenet to, not a substitute for, large military vessels. Witness the Littoral Combat Ship.

“In World War I, the failure to grasp the implications of mass production led not only to senseless slaughter, but also to the end of great empires and the bankruptcy of others.”

When I read this I realized the authors likely don’t know what they are talking about even though they stumble like a blind squirrel upon a few useful nuts. Anyone who has studied the First World War knows that the leadership of all the major combatants had a very solid idea of the consequences of the industrialization of the war. They realized that automatic weapons, vast artillery systems, indirect fire, chemical weapons, submarines, even embryonic aviation along with the accumulation of human and material reserves allowed the war to take on a new devastating shape and totality. What they lacked and what cause the greatest casualties was a lack of command and control via efficient communications. Tactics and operations had to be structured around the knowledge that the ability to control formations was lost upon initial contact with the enemy. In fact the functional control of troops in an offensive was little different from that of Caesars day except they were armed with vastly more lethal weapons.

All this talk of how best to swing the swashbuckling sword: with a flurry of rapier-like jabs or one flailing shillelagh or two, is a waste of time.

Strategists don’t talk about tactics, they talk about logistics. If they are smarter than most, they talk about strategic logistical support (politics).

Every year, it’s costing the West more millions of dollars and thousands of person-hours of logistical support to kill one of endless thousands of rag-clad adolescents who’ve been taught to fight to the death with a fistful of bullets and thrive on a handful of meal and a nod from God. Meanwhile, our logistical tail grows to the size of a brontosaurus, with never enough teeth to protect it reliably, much less achieve impossible objectives. Sound familiar?

The basic problem can be broken down to two extremes: raid or garrison. I leave it to you to figure out the mid-ground and make your stand there.

In the first case, small, logistically self-contained strike forces swarm against specific objectives. Propaganda, personnel and ideological targets are important, holding ground is not. Using strategic assets considered routine in rich societies, mobility, intelligence gathering (both human and virtual) and firepower/shock are emphasized. You identify your strategic enemies, you decapitate them and destroy their ordnance infrastructure and/or pipeline surgically, then withdraw to secure supply sources and wait for the next provocation. Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. What we do best. You do not (or very rarely) leave regiments of your grunts on the ground to serve as target practice for IED planters. You do not anchor your LOG tail as far away from your bases as possible, in the worst terrain possible, as vulnerably as possible. You use your strengths and avoid your weaknesses; or you lose to a local enemy who will learn, by firepower attrition and survival of the fittest, to avoid your former and exploit your latter. Well, duh…

Otherwise, you stay the hell out of other people’s business except diplomatically, with the constant threat of swarm assault should local confrontation accrue to unendurable levels. If you need to garrison an area, you do so with a flood of well-paid local troops (native or from adjacent countries acceptable to locals) and as few of your own trainers and firepower multipliers as you can get away with (or fewer). If your forces are foreign-based, you get them out just as soon as you can, per your promise on entry.

That means installing clean local government that attracts local loyalty like a magnet -- as opposed to the usual corrupt suspects from Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and U.S. examples prior and since, Honduras? No local leadership of lesser quality (the current strategic standard) will work under the raid strategy. Either you’re being greeted like liberators, with flowers and hot, sweet tea, or you’ve already gotten the hell out. Unrealistic of me? Look at the alternative.

In the second alternative, you inject your unwelcome troops into a post-colonial environment, soft-land your monstrous LOG tail on a flying carpet of million dollar bills, and confidently expect the impossible: that you will not be considered neo-colonialist aggressors and swarmed like every predecessor. You garrison your new colony (whether for economic, ideological or strategic reasons, it will remain a colony until you evacuate your troops), and suffer the crushing expense, high or low casualties, and far more significant ideological attrition that sledgehammer versus fly warfare imply. You are the bad guys in world opinion, by definition; and condemn yourself to the strategic consequences of that identity. You rely on the best local leadership you can pay off at minimal direct expense to yourself and maximal expense to the locals and the world (drug lord/war lord gangsters and nothing better).

Any local patriot not in your pay wishes you were dead. Given today’s pocket battleship killing technologies, such fatal wishes may come true on scales and in strategic depth unimaginable to our day-to-day awareness, without our standing a chance of stopping them in the long run.

You seek conflict? Fine. Adapt or die, regardless of the panache of your swordplay.

When I first started to read this article I was hoping to see something relating to Petraeus' counter insurgency efforts and the need for more cohesion between civil/law enforcement/tribal militia and the U.S. military in Afghanistan but instead I saw excuses for utter mis-management by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. After I realized that Mr. Arquilla was a former Rumsfeld advisor it all made sense. I can not believe that someone with a PHD from Stanford in International Studies would think that the key to total and complete victory and the quelling of GLOBAL violence could all be changed if we were a net-centric force. This notion is laughable. This is what happens when people who do not have TRUE military experience try to assess conflict situations and come up with their own solutions. Mr. Arquilla is similar to the current yahoos leading the way in Naval Intelligence that want to completely merge IT's, crypto specialists and intelligence analysts so we can have an Information Dominance Force. Of course having an organization capable of defending this communications infrastructure we rely on so heavily is necessary but it's not the end all/be all to save Afghanistan and Iraq alike. As some of my fellow readers have pointed out there is still a definite need for maintaining larger conventional forces capable of defeating threats from the likes of China and Russia. That does not mean we are limited in what we can do. I find it funny that Colin Powell's theories are accentuated as being so wrong and ancient while nothing is said of General Ramirez and the other high level leadership that fouled things up so badly from '04-'06. The author mentions that small unit tactics were working so well in Iraq before Petraeus came in. The author does not directly say but is hinting that General Petraeus (King David)'s surge and implementation of counter-insurgency tactics was miniscule compared to the excellent efforts of the great Donald Rumsfeld .... Please! It's not like Petraeus wrote the Holy Bible of Counter Insurgency! Oh wait he did! This article is pretty presumptuous and I hope people read more than this to form their opinions!

Clearly the tactics are still not keeping up with the technology, but the way to win a conflict is to take advantage of your strengths and try to exploit the weaknesses of the enemy.

If you're the insurgent underdog, your strength is in small units that are hard to detect and engage, and can strike targets of opportunity with or without networking.

That doesn't mean that the US should mirror the tactics of our opponents. That would be to ignore our strengths and play into the strengths of the enemy.

One thing that is right is that in recent wars finding is more important than engaging. Our difficulty in Iraq (after the first week) and Afghanistan is that we don't know where the enemy is. Once we find them, we can exploit our strength (technology, whether it is an F-22 or a cruise missile or a drone or well-trained and well-armed troops) and defeat them very easily. This was true to a lesser extent even in Viet Nam, although in that war we declined to exploit our technology even after we had located the enemy.

What we lack, that has been widely lamented, is the intelligence on the ground to locate the small emeny units where they are hidden or encamped. That is what we should be concentrating on in Iraq and Afghanistan, not surges of troops or sizes of outposts. It is the small outposts where we suffer the casualties, as they are less able to defend themselves against small enemy combat units than a larger base would be.

But the enemy today is not targeting our troops. The big problem is not what happens when our forces meet theirs, it is that theirs move freely and undetected among our civilian population. What we most need to do is stop peering through the clothing of grandmothers at airports, and start rounding up the known terrorists whose parents turn them in to the embassy.

It seems unclear how Mr Arquilla’s New Rules of War might have responded to blitzkrieg and gone on to win WW II in Europe, any better than by “gang-tackling” as he terms it. He seems to ignore the political imperative of the Allies’ need to hold back so that Nazism-Facism and SovCommunism would almost annihilate each other gang-tackling on the eastern front.

May I define some terms for the purpose of discussion:

“Swarming” or “Swarm” is a warfighting doctrine.

“Swarm” is also the totality of the physical warfighting assets employed.

An “element” is the smallest tactical division of the swarm. An element may be one (heavily armed, armored, and mobile) soldier or drone, or – more likely – a group of soldiers and/or drones and/or robots or other fighting units (ships or planes, for example).

For elements composed of a groups, a “component” is an individual (or drone, or plane, etc) - the smallest subdivision of an element. All components of a given element need not be identical.

What modifications to these definitions, or other definitions, are needed to further discussion?

--

Swarming, as proposed, is a doctrine. It can be applied at any level of warfighting, from the company level up. Swarming is both a way to apply and sustain firepower against an enemy after “finding” him (operating on the assumption that methods other than swarming will more often result in the enemy successfully “hiding” again), and also a means of finding him, because intermingling with the enemy is implied (with acknowledgment of best practices considering the relative weaponry, survivability and mobility of the combatants).

A swarm is the logical extreme of a “divided force” except the classical disadvantage of divided force (being destroyed by a larger force that might not have destroyed the combined whole) is deflected because individual swarm elements (for example, a platoon of soldiers – each soldier being a “component” of its element) are functionally expendable. Swarming does not necessarily imply that large numbers of swarming troops (or drones or robots) are not needed. The very word itself connotes “quantity” prevailing over – something – perhaps less numerous inferior guerilla “hiders,” perhaps superior quality but outnumbered foes, perhaps more numerous but less maneuverable formations of enemy.

It is difficult to understand a “swarm” without superior numbers on the swarming side, until you grasp that the necessity of the total of the swarm’s elements’ smallest constituent parts – the ‘component’ the individual soldier or drone – to outnumber its opponents is one among a set of sliding scales, being: survivability (against the level of enemy lethality), lethality (against the level of enemy survivability) – which are functions of weaponry, armor, terrain, command, mobility, and doctrine (including sustainability – the ability (or lack) to persist in an environment over time without effectiveness being impacted). This can largely be reduced to mathematics. Establish values or ranges for the above variables and it becomes obvious whether or not your total components need outnumber total enemy components.

Swarming is as old (or nearly) as war. As the article observed: the Mongols. Apply the variables above to the Mongols and their foes, and you see the math. The airborne drops in D-Day and Market Garden were limited attempts at swarming. The initial attack on Afghanistan after 9/11 was both a swarm and a failure to swarm (failure to insert blocking (AB or airmobile) forces to interdict the enemy’s mass flight). The problems for the swarm-inclined general include: How to get the elements into position (infiltration). How to coordinate the elements’ actions (more difficult than with a united front). How to incorporate sufficient lethality, survivability and sustainability (logistics issues) into the elements, relative to the enemy. None of these are easy questions.

Comments and further elaboration would be enjoyed.

wye

This article asks a question whose premise is wrong. The question is "how can the US better fight wars against irregulars in a civilian population (the "new war"), and what are the rules?", when the answer is that it can't and that any "rules" you derive will be circumvented and useless by the time you implement them. Undeclared wars have been a problem in this country since Korea, and we've lost or been fought to a draw every single time.

The answer to the question is this:

If the actor is a state, declare war via an act of Congress, then go in with the full industrial might of the United States. Close the borders, then kill everything enhancing the enemy's ability to make war, which will likely include noncombatants, children, civilian infrastructure, and natural resources in addition to military/irregular infrastructure and personnel. If there is no will to actually declare war and engage in total war from the get-go, then the war is not worth fighting in the first place. All wars become total wars eventually, if we recognize this fact we will recognize that fighting undeclared wars and promoting 'soft power' means we just lose more slowly -- but we will lose.

If the actor is non-state, we must recognize that wars cannot be declared against non-state actors or (ha) tactics themselves ("War on Terror"). Such things are in the purview of the police forces of various countries. Terror attacks on the United States proper are already within the purview of the FBI, police, and the DOJ, and they do their job well - because they have the support of the *already existing civilian human networks* here that catch Boom-Boom Abdul easily because his neighbor Bob the Electrician looks through his window, sees a batch of TATP in an ice bath on his kitchen table, and calls the police. Those networks are the result of people having a sense of civic duty and awareness, and they simply cannot be created from whole cloth in a country where we are the invaders, no matter how much we try to win hearts and minds. Abdul and any backers in the US are then arrested, prosecuted, sent to jail. We identify those abroad responsible, arrest them in concert with international authorities, bring them here, try them, and jail them. Because Abdul is from country A or supported by someone in country B does not mean we invade A or B. If we cannot arrest them, we don't resort to putting a .308 bullet in their CT vault from 600 yards or a Hellfire into their gas tank from 2 miles up, we wait until they can be arrested by a country's police force or spirited out of the country by a SF team.

Note that I am quite anti-war. The point is that war is an ugly, wasteful business and cannot be half-assed. The United States should go to war because our very survival is at stake, not because we want to prevent a mere 0.001% of our population getting whacked in 9-11-style theatrical fashion every couple decades. Is the existence of the United States threatened by half a division of irregulars 8,000 miles away? No, it is not, and we should not be there.

Besides, 3,000 people on 9-11 absolutely pales in comparison to the number of people dying from McDonald's, cigarettes, and auto accidents. Our priorities are backwards.

With respect to large scale internal swarm attacks like Mumbai, an answer is to have a swarm of your own - a civilian population that is well armed and can shoot back.

Brilliant analysis, and probably prophetic. I tend to agree with the 3 trillion figure for Iraq, and the loss of reputation and esteem is even greater. Our invade, shock and awe, and force submission failed miserably for years, cost us thousands of casualties with no real success, and went on failing much longer than it should have. I hope the War College professors are ordered to read this by Obama, and write an old fashioned book report acknowledging at least that they understand what the author is talking about if they don't agree. Iraq and Afhanistan sear this theory in blood and treasure to even the most casual observer. With overwhelming superiority in every military skill and asset, these 3rd world military operators have stood us up and kept us at bay. Do we really need another example of how to not fight these wars? Bravo sir, I hope the Joint Chiefs are listening.

While the general argument articulated in this article is sound, the suggestions made by its author are unlikely, if impossible, because of political realities.

The movement towards smaller, more nimble units rightly has to come from the generals. The politicians cannot call for what would amount to the shelving of major projects with the military currently involved in major theatres of conflict, nor would many of them wish to given the lobbying they receive from corporations who benefit from such projects. Equally, politicians are in no position to tell the military how to conduct its battles beyond general rules of thumb regarding minimising adverse publicity. Plus politicians like big shiny aircraft carriers and planes for the photo ops and prestige they provide. In a political sense bigger is definitely better.

So the generals would need to spearhead this change of strategy themselves. But then many of them are wedded to old ways of thinking and, let's face it, to the kudos that new, big weapons systems brings them.

And, as the articles also explains, this strategy would mean a reduction in budgets for the military. The default position of any branch of government, be it military or whatever, is that more will solve their problems. More money, more manpower, more whatever - so long as they are likely to get it they will ask for it. The military knows it can keep pushing the envelope, despite the financial crisis, because of the current threats posed to the USA and it's major engagements around the globe. The USA is at war, after all. No department is going to request that it's budget be reduced, which is what developing a "many but small" approach would mean.

So the impetus for that - a reduction in military budgets - would need to be spearheaded by the poiticians. No politician is going to do that, especially not with a Democratic government accused of being weak on national security currently occupying the White House. Regardless of the fact on the ground, any perceived cuts would be pounced on by neo-cons and the lobby that supports them.

It's a catch 22 - the politicians won't call for the change because it would be perceived as cuts and political inteference; the military won't call for change because it could jeopardise current funding levels.

What America lacks is human intelligence, both in Iraq and Afghanistan; if that is remedied then we may be able to make a better assessment of the current American combat doctrine.

..........

Welcome dialogue, sans the creeping politik. Mr. Aquillra's offering(s) did not resonate with me either.

My contribution won't be as busy as some, but I trust it will have some acceptance. America is consistantly referred to as the world's superpower and in many ways we might agree. In the context of military might is where I raise my eyebrows. From the standpoint of manning, the all-volunteer military has created a less than "superpower" Army and Marine Corps. The combination of too few resources, "help" from Washington, and the preoccupation of our military leaders with internal politics, is a witches brew.

Yes, absolutely correct: Nuclear weapons are not useful in a war: "But it turned out they were useful only in deterring their use." But that Ronald Reagan was a cold war warrior states it very nicely, and it helps in logical link building that Reagan gave a speech in April 1983 declaring that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."

You say:"Even the implications of maturing tanks, planes, and the radio waves that linked them were only partially understood by the next generation of military men". Does it mean they get older and such, needing treatment and getting older and such. Things like yeast infection relief come to mind. Just some associations. Nothing could be further from the truth.

War is a failed paradigm at solving the worlds problems and serves merely to create the causes and conditons for the next war in an endless chain of wars leading nowhere. War does not work as a legal system, to fight poverty, to fight drugs, between the sexes, in combat of ideas and ideology or in academic areas or in business. The human race has embraced a template based on instincts of dominance and submission and territoriality and the duality of win and lose, black and white. These are conditions rarely effective in an interdependent world. If we can't get beyond the willingness to accept collateral damage in service to conceptual goals that are based on ancient territorial and survival instincts we as a species will soon be the cause of our own extinction.

Wow! That’s all I can say.

I really expected more; however I am so enraged at this "forward thinker" and his nice neat "we are doing it wrong" package... with a side of "it should be done this way"... I can't stand arm-chair QBs that have not been on convoys in Iraq, or have seen rockets go over their heads (Please correct me on this but nowhere in any bio, I have read, of Mr. Arquilla is any military service listed).

I do agree, in part, with his central motive that the military is slow to chance. That argument has been proven over and over again. Just read his article it is a rehash of Command and General Staff College (CGSC) history lessons.

What he is not telling you (the readers) is that this is driven top down by our elected officials on high with their military contracts that keep jobs in their state and commanders who command via predator feeds because senior military and civilian leaders demand zero flaws and constant updates.

Once I digest the whole issue I will write more...

For right now I will say this, the US could win this (these) war(s) that we are in. However CNN, Fox, and other 24 hours news sources have made that impossible. It may not be PC but we could win. I fear by doing so we would have to sell the souls of our young war fighting men and women.

Signed:
An Army Officer who fears for the young troops that I have commanded, and will command in the future, Service Families, our Army and our Nation