Hey Rob,
Sorry about the rather rambling reply - I hadn't had enough coffee yet . Last night I hosted the monthly get together of the Carleton U. Counter-Terrorism Discussion Group. Outside of the great wide-ranging discussions, we have this tradition of trying out new red wine....
Funny you should mention resettlement and human migration . That was one of our discussion topics last night, and it's also an area I've been working in for 7-8 years now. I'm actually writing a white paper right now on immigrant integration that is using a lot of ideas that I worked out when thinking about COIN.
How a system is changed depends on a number of factors, but the modeling of such system changes, at least in terms of biological populations, has been worked out for quite a while (see, for example, Lotka's Elements of Mathematical Biology). It becomes a question of competition within a specific environmental niche, and it can be theoretically modeled using evolutionary theory (Wm. Calvin's 6 Essentials gives a really nice model).
Yupper, 'cause they change the competitive pressures within any particular resource niche. "Regular" is really shorthand for "what we have always done and tends to be homeostatic and based on perceptions, while "irregular" is shorthand for "what we are forced to do even though we don't like it - it ain't natural!" . In a non-combat example, we can see a lot of this being discussed in Ohio surrounding the economy and, specifically, jobs.
Marc
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