New Rules of War

[Bill Moore]

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.

[Firn]

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.

I think it will be interesting to give the concepts of biological swarms a closer look. Still Ken is on something when he points at the human element. So far, the use of principles of the so called "swarm intelligence" seems to have been proven to be a very interesting instrument in specific areas like computing.

"Ant warfare" too is fascinating stuff. And there is much more than meets the eye.


Firn

[Fuchs]

I personally have an interest in how we could exploit 'natural' self-organisation of people (for example let them find their talented leader themselves instead of force them to accept one) and horizontal coordination (neighbouring units cooperate to reduce the need for guidance of relatively ignorant staffs from higher levels).

[M-A Lagrange]

Dear Fuch

Your point is extremely valuable.
Dr Kilcullen did point out, in a past article in SWJ, the fact that for practicle reasons we did not really move since cold war as we still are looking for an elite to speak with. He was pointing out that because of our patern of governance we do need to have elites that do conform to our (western) standards.
the solution we did found to have the people choosing their chiefs and elites are elections. But as we all know here, elections do not warranty that the people will choose their elite, an elite their consider as legitimate and even less an elite that WE will consider as a good and relevant interlocutor.

I really think that there is something to be digging out on that particular point that will really bring a new way in "war", especially in the stabilisation/state building phase.