Military Swarming

[Solid]

I came across the concept of 'military swarming' (http://www.rand.org/commentary/100703AWST.html) while studying new evolutions of maneuver warfare. The idea is intriguing, especially in the above article as it links the concept to SpecOps warfare.
Do you guys see this as a feasible strategy for the US to attempt to implement in the near future? Is it multi-applicable, or only useful against nations that fight symmetrically?

Thanks,

Solid

EDITED to add- more material on swarming and its military applications can be found at:http://www.sci.fi/~fta/swarming.htm

[Jack Moroney (RIP)]

Originally Posted by Solid

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Do you guys see this as a feasible strategy for the US to attempt to implement in the near future? Is it multi-applicable, or only useful against nations that fight symmetrically?

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There are currently many technological "advances" looking for a mission and there is always someone who will get hooked on technology and try to apply it to fit neatly into a strategy without fully understanding the threat. Swarming is not new and becomes a useful strategy when the threat against which it is going to be employed is vulnerable to that strategy. The challenge for the five sided concrete sphincter to adopt any strategy(s) is predicated on the marching orders it gets to develop their part in protecting our national interests. The problem is two fold in that defining the national interests is the purview of elected officials and threat identification is the purview of the various intel agencies who either cannot develop effective collection measures because of the same elected officials who defined (correctly or incorrectly) the national interests or cannot get folks to believe that the threat actually exists.

[x SF med]

If you have ever read "The Tactics of Mistake" by Gordon R. Dickson - he used this concept in the model for the Dorsai (along with the original SF model). This same model was used by the Mongol "Special Forces" (Mongodai [sp?] led by Yasutai. This model was also used by a few of the Roman Centuries (ineffectively) in the stand in the Pyrennes. Gotta hand it to the Rand guys, they're once again recycling little known ideas as the panacaea for the military, and passing them off as their own.

BUT, in the Dickson model - communication, training and initiative were fused into a single cohesive part of the strategy (sound familiar, guys?) and split or short teams could be just as effective as the full team - based on knowing what your other elements were going to do.

[Solid]

Thanks, guys. I'll have to look into "The Tactics of Mistake," sounds very interesting. Further reading in works by Arquilla discusses methods of defeating these 'swarm' networks (which seem to be how many terrorist groups are organized). Arquilla believes that a non-hierarchical 'networked' organization where points are often related to a slew of randomly dispersed other points can operate much more quickly than a hierarchical organization. As such, for terrorist networks to be beaten, we need our own counter/anti-terror networks which function in a similar way.

While it is my understanding that some of our intelligence assets are networked in a non-hierarchical structure, it seems to me that there are more often than not hierarchical strictures inplace, often for the purpose of security and command/control.

Would it be possible for the US to develop semi-autonomous non-hierarchical networks, and would these networks be better at fighting terror groups because they operate with greater speed, and thus get right up inside the T's OODA loops?

Thanks,

Solid