To get back to Arquilla's original argument about the need for smaller/smarter/more flexible/networked forces as a necessary response to networked insurgents using a "swarm" approach, it struck me today that we actually have a paired comparison of two militaries, organized along radically different lines, faced with insurgencies in similar human and physical terrain:

1) Ba'thist Iraq versus various Kurdish insurgencies, and the 1991 uprising in the south

2) US/coalition/Iraqi forces versus various Iraqi insurgencies, 2003-present

The ponderous, hierarchical, Soviet-style Iraqi military was, by any possible measure, for more successful at suppressing insurgents than has been the much more flexible, modular, networked US military... quite the reverse of what Arquilla's argument would suggest.

The answer, as I'm sure everyone realizes, is rooted in the willingness of the Ba'th to use force in certain ways, and the balance of terror that it was thereby able to establish. Don't get me wrong--I'm not suggesting the "Roman" (or Ba'thist) model as an appropriate approach for post-Cold War Western COIN and stability operations. I am suggesting that what has changed here is not so much the rise of the "swarm" but the very much greater importance of the changing social, political, normative, legal, and informational milieu within which COIN operations take place.