Arquilla on the New Rules of War

February 25th, 2010 by zen

It was nice to see Arquilla give some props to VADM Art Cebrowski, who is underappreciated these days as a strategic thinker and is much critricized by people who seldom bothered to read anything he actually wrote. Or who like to pretend that he had said a highly networked Naval task force is a good way to tackle an insurgency in an arid, mostly landlocked, semi-urban, middle-eastern nation.

It also occurs to me that one of the reasons that the USAF resisted drones tooth and nail is that robotics combined with swarming points to en end ( or serious diminishment) of piloted warplanes. Eliminating the design requirements implicit in human pilots makes for a smaller, faster, more maneuverable, more lethal aircraft that will probably be infinitely cheaper to make, more easily risked in combat and usable for “swarming”. Ditto attack helicopters.

Of course, nuclear bombers will probably stay in human hands. Probably.

ADDENDUM:

Contentious Small Wars Council thread on Arquilla begun by “student of war” and defense consultant Wilf Owen. I have weighed in as has Shlok Vaidya.

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Posted in 21st century, 3 gen gangs, 4GW, 9/11, academia, Afghanistan, Air Force, al qaida, America, army, authors, Cebrowski, complex systems, connectivity, david ronfeldt, defense, foreign policy, futurism, government, hierarchy, ideas, insurgency, intellectuals, john arquilla, military, military reform, national security, navy, network theory, Network-centric Warfare, networks, non-state actors, organizations, robotics, social networks, theory, war | 6 comments

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  1. Arherring:

    February 25th, 2010 at 6:53 pm

    The article os very well written, and I like the army men visuals, but if he is advocating the abandonment of the few/large mentality in favor of a many/small approach then he is setting down a path, with all the right intentions, that leads to the very same sin of overspecialization.
    .
    There is nothing really new about these "New Rules," they are just as flawed as the old rules, and for the same reasons. What is required is flexibility and adaptability, an approach to conflict that is multi-spectral (military, diplomatic, economic, social ect.) not just multi-axial.

  2. J. Scott:

    February 25th, 2010 at 9:51 pm

    Zen,  After following Wilf and Dunbar at FB—and finally having opportunity to read the essay, my impression is more aligned with "nothing new under the sun." Arquilla is absolutely correct w/respect to the Navy’s continued love affair with super carriers and rejection of modern diesel electric submarines, but the new rules are found wanting from a national security perspective in one key area; the ability of the Army to fight at a Division/Corps level against a national enemy. I know the common wisdom says in a world of globalization, we won’t fight that sort of war. I’m not so sure. The article seems more geared toward flexible/adaptable tactics than some new paradigm.

  3. zen:

    February 26th, 2010 at 12:51 am

    Hey guys
    .
     "but the new rules are found wanting from a national security perspective in one key area; the ability of the Army to fight at a Division/Corps level against a national enemy"
    .
    I agree the rules do not scale at every level of conflict. Fair criticism. Moreover, even absent Arquilla’s rules, we are losing the ability to fight at the division, army and army corps level regardless because we have gone "modular", shrunk the size of the military since 1989 while having more operational commitments and fewer opponents who will stand up and fight us that way . I see North Korea doing that for lack of options but it is a capacity we need to retain.
    .
    That said, the pile on at SWC is blindly one-sided, I will comment there later tonight after the kids are in bed and the house is a little quieter 🙂

  4. Younghusband:

    February 26th, 2010 at 5:59 am

    This article presents nothing new. Arquilla uses many of the same examples in his book. Modularity has been submitted as a flexible solution mentioned by arherring above, but mostly this has been a series of buzzwords. Fact is, in expeditionary warfare the military has to take everything including the kitchen sink for contingency’s sake. Until the fuel problem is solved, and we have instantaneous transport (or return to living off the land like the warriors of yore) military deployment will always be big.

    At the other end, the brilliant aspect of a working network is the fact that none of the nodes are identical. For example, look at the artwork accompanying the article: all the soldiers are the same. Our militaries are based on soldiers being a cog in the machine. To have a true heterogenous netwok we need to abandon the staff system we have now. Good luck with that. To get the kind of transformation that Arqilla envisions will require a true Revolution in Military Affairs.

  5. Shlok:

    February 26th, 2010 at 6:28 am

    I suspect privatization will yield the extreme decentralization that Arquilla is prescribing, independent of a nation-state host though.

  6. Younghusband:

    February 26th, 2010 at 7:15 am

    That’s what I was thinking Shlok: privateers.