Some initial rough thoughts on swarming that I hope to clean up later, but in the meantime swarm away on my comments if you wish.

Examples of military units employing the conventional tactics of encirclement, isolate, attack (whether at one point, or multiple points) is a terrible example if the intent is to show how the world has changed and the military just hasn't keep pace. Also agree with Wilf on the strategic comments, what strategic swarming example did he present? The Rand paper wasn't any better.

Putting article and discussing the concept of swarming from other discussions I had about swarming (before 9/11); it originally was self-organizing crowds who respond to spontaneously, or nearly spontaneously to an event. In some cases the swarm develops momentum over time. I don't think we or our enemies have yet learned to harness this potential to its full capacity.

Rough examples, and perhaps upon further consideration I'll withdraw these, but for now they are ideas for consideration.

1. The battle for Seattle, while many of the groups attended the protests with the clear intent to not only demonstrate against globalism, but create chaos they managed to trigger a much larger response where numerous protestors (who had no intent to do this originally) responded to the events and swarmed upon the security forces, and to some extent they actually self organized as a crowd. A few short years later we saw protesters from all over Europe swarm upon Genova, Italy to do the same thing.

2. I think many of the Eastern European independence movements (from the USSR) were representative of swarming.

3. There have been many instances of cyber swarming. There have been many times in recent years where the internet crowd would form a community of interest (self organizing) and attack a particular computer.

4. In Iraq there were many cases where coalition forces would be attacked, and spontaneously (not planned) numerous civilans would join the fray and swarm upon the unit in peril.

5. Most recently we had many Iranians self organize and protest the legitimacy of the election using twitter and other social networking devices, which resulted in a swarming action of sorts.

What's the so what of this? I think swarming can be used as an unconventional means to achieve strategic effect by intentionally releasing some information that turns on the swarm. This can be employed by both State and non-State actors.

Tired, calling it a night, but I think you see where I'm trying to go with this.