Shloky,

Here's the thing. How do we coordinate the "swarming" or attacking from multiple directions/with multiple means across the whole of government? We have a hard enough time within DoD with inter-service rivalries and equipment that doesn't talk to each other. And that's just tactical. Who's the person that is going to coordinate the inter-governmental "swarm" that will be the strategy? The only department in our government that has the global capability is Defense (lift, comms, people, money, and compulsory service) and (since this will inevitably involve a nation) the ambassador works for the President and not a combatant commander (or some special four-star). How long did it take for us to get relationships right in Iraq? How long will they take in Afghanistan with that many more nations?
Sure. That's not a flaw in swarming as doctrine, that's question of implementation.

That said, JSOC is a pretty good starting point of achieving what Arquilla's talking about, and how to achieve it. Highly trained, small, distributed teams to conduct complex operations with teams as small as two to several hundred.

What Arquilla says is "strategic" what he describes is tactical and operational. The quote in the box of you 11:28 PM post says it all.
Few units above the company grade; ridding the DoD of all the fat accumulated in the last few decades. Those are strategic choices, focused on restructuring your force to leverage an enhanced information environment. Indeed, the quote does say it all.

As to Don Vandergriff - I've read his stuff and talked to him about it. It's not new either. It's brought to the attention of folks who need to see it, but it's done on a daily basis in units in our army. Ken White had some great points here. http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/200...irregular-war/ But it's still at the tactical level. If it is something that folks latch onto and can say, look we're improving our Army with it, then fine, but it (like many other ideas being thrown around) isn't new. It came from Kriegspiel.

I do think that there are some good ideas there, but they're what we did in Korea when I was a platoon leader and what I put my platoon leaders through when I was a company commander. Reading and playing out scenarios on a terrain board and then critiquing it isn't new - but again (like Ken says) it works and builds adaptive leaders. Just so Don doesn't hate on me, I do think that it needs to be more in TRADOC courses rather than death by slide and I do think that it needs to be more draconian and folks need to be called out when they make mistakes.
Of course its not new. Not sure anyone has ever claimed that adaptive leadership is new. To claim it's prevalent is disingenuous though.

Training by rote is the norm, training by innovation is rare. Don's work is a useful framework for approaching it.

In the context of swarming, his work can help address the need that Ken brought up - ensuring we have highly trained, highly adaptive guys in the field.