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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scoobah who wrote (1171)	12/9/2001 12:00:35 PM
From: John Curtis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32591

What we've been observing in Afghanistan is the next step/generation in military tactical theory and implementation best summarized by a term in an article on page 56 of this Sundays New York Times Magazine: **** Battleswarm Recent events in Somalia, Kosovo, Chechnya and Afghanistan show that the new global threat is not conventionally massed national armies but what one study calls "ethnonatialist paramilitary bands, organized in small, dispersed units." For the United States to succeed in combat against those forces, according to military theorists John Arquilla and David Rondfeldt of the RAND Corporation's National Defense Research Institute, we need a new form of combat: "swarming." Arquilla and Ronfeldt intend it to transform the American military machine. Under what they call the "BattleSwarm" doctrine, large armies split up and spread out into small, stinging minigroups, every bit as mobile as any local guerrilla band but, thanks to an array of hand-held digital communications tools, smarter, better-connected and far more powerful. In their recent theoretical work, "Swarming and the Future of Conflict," Arquilla and Ronfeldt describe future American armed forces that look like hordes of cyber-Mongols. Deceptively lightly armed, these fast, almost invisible specialized forces have no trenches, no forts, no supply dumps. They are arrayed not in platoons or battalions but in "clusters" and "pods." They use encrypted radios, satellite siting and precision-guided munitions. They can call in airstrikes and direct cruise missiles remotely. Infiltrating the landscape in copters and off-road buggies, they float like butterflies but sting like sledgehammers. They don't need much in the way of supplies, for their biggest weapons are carried for them by offshore submarines, aircraft carriers and stealth bombers. Their basic aims are "stealthy ubiquity" -- you never know where they are or what they're spying on -- and "information domination" of the "battlespace" -- which means that they can learn about the enemy much faster than the enemy can learn about them. Thanks to global positioning systems, American pods never get lost in the backwoods. Guiding smart bombs with hand-held lasers, they can quickly and accurately demolish anything they can see. If the enemy disperses under those attacks, then the swarming pods close in on them, outnumbering lost units, crushing them and vanishing long before reinforcements arrive. With electronic warfare skills, they specialize in killing enemy communications, so the enemy is always bewildered and off-balance. No supply line is ever safe. The downside? Life for civilians. There are no front lines. There is no shelter. There is no place to hide. Bruce Sterling. **** I submit this is what we're watching evolve in front of our eyes. I further submit this is where warfare is going, aided and abetted (since in our modern world no single nation-state can aggressively act alone and long prevail) by collaboration with others who feel threatened in exactly the same way as the U.S. does now with terrorism. In a nutshell high-tech "police" actions are becoming more the norm in this our increasingly integrated world. John~