....Indeed, it might serve us best if we completely reconsidered the very problematic notion of waging a war of ideas against an enemy whose core constituency of zealots – numbering in the several tens of millions, if opinion polls across the Muslim world are to be believed – will never be talked down by even the slickest rhetoric. So instead, with the goal in mind of improving our ability to detect, disrupt and destroy terror networks, we should recast our intellectual efforts in favor of conducting “a war of ideas about the idea of war.” If such a debate were fostered and undertaken, there would be a good chance that our military might be able to make the shift, in a more supple manner, from industrial-age interstate warfare – characterized by mass-on-mass maneuvers – to the new age of conflict in which the fundamental dynamic is that of “hider/finder,” and whose key tactical formation is a “
swarm” capable of simultaneous, omni-directional attack.....
Bookmarks