JOURNAL: Swarming Attacks

My friend, the great military theoretician John Arquilla (he's not only one of the most gracious people I've ever met, he's also the author of many seminal works that have greatly influence my thinking) has an excellent new article in the New York Times called "The Coming Swarm."  

It's essentially a warning that swarming attacks of what he terms "the Mumbai model," will become more frequent and most will be successful.  

John is definitely correct.   It's my belief, and I suspect that John would concur, that the reason we will see more swarming is due to the pervasive influence of decentralized organizational forms, like open source insurgency, on warfare's evolution.  Swarming is a characteristic of these loosely connected organizations.  Potential development paths for which we have ample evidence (seen in early proving grounds for modern warfare like Iraq) include:

• More ambitious attacks that eventually attempt complete and sustained urban takedowns.  See "The Coming Urban Terror" for more on how physical attacks and systems disruption can combine to fully disrupt cities.   
• Rapid innovation for DIY weapons development.  See "Tinkering Networks" for more.  
• The development of strategy without generals or think tanks.  See "Emergent Intelligence" for more.   

NOTE:  Since systemic shocks, like the current debt-deflation depression, catalyze the growth of open source insurgency, we can expect to see an accelerating wave of swarming attacks in the future.  

NOTE2:  I suspect that one reason for the atrocious behavior of our current crop of elites is that they (being historically naive) don't fear the mob anymore.  They should.  When things eventually erupt, we will see fewer placards (protest doesn't work anymore) and more bombs.  

NOTE3:  Shlok Vaidya is already working on decentralized approaches to swarm prevention/mitigation  with Indian security professionals for real world applications.