In all cases of radical improvements in warfare, the actual improvement is made much more through new thinking on how to fight than from innovations in weaponry. These innovations in theory typically don't occur via a linear process of evolution but rather through rapid breakthroughs. A breakthrough of this type was made by the German General Heinz Guderian. In the early 1930’s he read the innovative theories of armored warfare written by Liddell Hart and JFC Fuller as was convinced they represented a radical change in how war can be fought -- as opposed to the stalemate of defense typified by WWI. In secret he practiced the methods he learned with cardboard tanks. Years later, he rode real tanks in a Blitzkrieg across France in 1940 with devastating effect.
Our current situation is characterized by a similar stalemate of defense. America and Israel are fighting a bloody war of attrition with terrorists with neither side able to achieve a decisive result. To trace the development of this new form of warfare, it is necessary to examine the how armored warfare achieved its success. There are strong similarities between it and what is coming.
The success of Blitzkrieg rests on a brilliant insight: modern militaries are heavily reliant on extremely large and ponderous logistics and communication systems. The relationship between fighting men and the people that support them is called the tooth-to-tale ratio. That ratio has been growing at a furious rate over the last century -- it is currently at high of 10 support people for every “trigger-puller.” The objective in maneuver-based armored combat (Blitzkrieg) is to separate the forward deployed fighting forces from their logistics and command system by driving to the rear of the enemy. Given the ongoing and immediate needs of the mass of forward deployed soldiers for copious supplies and strict command/control, the interruption caused by armored forces operating in rear areas rapidly results in a collapse along forward deployed line, pell-mell retreat, and capture.
In this new substrate (nation-states vs. non-state networks within a global, information economy), global guerrillas will use a similar insight to win decisive battles. In this context, the conventional armies of nation-states aren't the target, a nation-state's economic and societal infrastructure is. Specifically, our large urbanized population centers are reliant on a complex set of relatively automated infrastructures. The operational objective of the global guerrilla warfare will be to separate a large urban population from its infrastructure and take advantage of the collapse and chaos that results. Global guerrilla operations will rapidly maneuver to or swarm on an urban center's infrastructure, attack it as quickly as possible at critical junctures to cause systemic collapse, continue the attacks as long as practicable, and disappear until the next operation.