Tim, I'm, as usual, a bit puzzled as to how to reply. Like many of our conversations, it looks to me as our words are only tangentially in contact.
Let me back up to the original post. I took the meaning of that NYTimes article to be that Hezbollah has taken the notion of assymetric warfare to a new place, one in which it's less about specific guerilla groups engaged in traditional guerilla actions and more one in which those groups are connected, networked to use the author's phrase.
So, while the command structure might look to be, and I recall the author does say so, flat, it's important to see that the groups are coordinated and, in that sense, something more than flatness is involved.
The use of high tech communications devices appears to be endemic. For instance.
Is this a new model of combat? I don't know whether it is in some rather long historical sense. But it does appear so in the context of the present. Like any good model, pieces, perhaps all the pieces are old, but the newness is the way they are put together. And the importance is the degree to which they appear to be duplicatable by other, let's call them, insurgent groups.
If so, one thing that is happening before our very bleary eyes, is a different form of combat. In a time in which the US is crippled in its ability to rethink combat. It simply lacks the leadership to do so. (That's a multitude of sins, not simply lacks it at the top).
I'm, quite frankly, for as much containment of these hostilities as quickly as possible, not only to reduce the senseless loss of life but to give some chance of time reducing the edge. I don't see how the warfare goes anywhere but into more and worse warfare.
Whether new or old. |
