Hi Zen,

Quote Originally Posted by zenpundit View Post
What I found to be very odd, on a board where strategic thinking is highly valued, that no one addressed Arquilla's introduction where he raised the critical variable of cost-effectiveness of large unit operations against smaller, irregular and networked opponents. Maybe Arquilla was not explicit enough. Let me try.
I picked up on it but, honestly, i thought it was a complete and utter red herring. The cost effectiveness argument is based on a positive returns ROI only. In other words, he isn't including the "costs" (or potential costs) of not having big units with a lot of conventional force. My suspicion as to why he left it out is that the two examples that come to my mind, Rome late 4th century and Byzantium ca. 1030, both took his current advice and got trashed as a result of it. It is analogous to a bank saying "Well, we haven't had a robbery in years, so let's cut costs by doing away with our security people and systems"; aka, as my friends in IT put, an id1t error.