Swarming

Swarming - The next new major warfighting doctrine?

Swarming -- The Next Face of Battle, By John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt

Swarming -- The Next Face of Battle

By John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt

This opinion article appeared in the Aviation Week & Space Technology on September 29, 2003.

Technological advances often give rise to new types of weapons, but the achievement of lasting breakthroughs in fighting power requires organizational and doctrinal innovation as well. Invention of the internal combustion engine more than a century ago, for example, led to the tank and airplane. Yet these weapons systems did not realize their potential until the 1930s, when the Germans concentrated their armor into panzer divisions and articulated a blitzkrieg doctrine that tightly coupled maneuver forces on the ground with attack aircraft above. Today, the U.S. military is fielding awesome new technologies, but it is still far from figuring out the right organizational structures and doctrines for best applying them.

Advanced information technologies have revolutionized U.S. forces' abilities to communicate swiftly, monitor enemy movements in real-time, operate vehicles remotely -- on land, at sea, or in the air -- and guide weapons in a way that effectively decouples range from accuracy. Yet, only modest attempts at organizational and doctrinal innovation have been tried.

The U.S. Air Force is experimenting organizationally by creating "composite" wings and tailored "air expeditionary forces" that mix different types of air platforms in the same tactical combat units. A concomitant new doctrinal emphasis on supporting advanced ground operations is bringing modern air power tantalizingly close, after so many decades, to realizing its fullest war-winning potential. The Marines have also engaged in field exercises in which the units of maneuver have been radically altered by creating autonomous units as small as eight-man squads. The Marines (not to mention special operations forces) understand that connectivity coupled with air mastery greatly empowers even the smallest combat formations.

Read the full text from the RAND website

From linear to maneuver and swarming

"Swarming - Sting Like a Bee" AW&ST 29 Sept 2003, Swarming in Warfare

John Arquilla earned his degrees in international relations from Rosary College (BA, 1975) and Stanford University (MA, 1989; Ph.D., 1991). He is an associate professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His teaching includes courses in the history of special operations, international political theory, the revolution in military affairs, and information-age conflict. He has written Lessons from the War with Saddam Hussein (RAND, 1991), Dubious Battles (Crane Russak, 1992), and From Troy to Entebbe (University Press of America, 1996), as well as many articles, book chapters, and monographs on a wide range of topics in security affairs. He is best known for his collaborative RAND studies with David Ronfeldt, notably Cyberwar is Coming! (1993), The Advent of Netwar (1996), In Athena's Camp (1997), and Swarming and the Future of Conflict (1999). Their latest book, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (2001) analyzes the rise of terror and transnational criminal networks, and considers strategic options for waging the current terror war.

Swarm Intelligence: An Interview with Eric Bonabeau:

What do ants and bees have to do with business? A great deal, it turns out. Individually, social insects are only minimally intelligent, and their work together is largely self-organized and unsupervised. Yet collectively they're capable of finding highly efficient solutions to difficult problems and can adapt automatically to changing environments. Over the past 20 years, the authors and other researchers have developed rigorous mathematical models to describe this phenomenon, which has been dubbed "swarm intelligence," and they are now applying them to business. Their research has already helped several companies develop more efficient ways to schedule factory equipment, divide tasks among workers, organize people, and even plot strategy. Emulating the way ants find the shortest path to a new food supply, for example, has led researchers at Hewlett-Packard to develop software programs that can find the most efficient way to route phone traffic over a telecommunications network. Southwest Airlines has used a similar model to efficiently route cargo. To allocate labor, honeybees appear to follow one simple but powerful rule--they seem to specialize in a particular activity unless they perceive an important need to perform another function. Using that model, researchers at Northwestern University have devised a system for painting trucks that can automatically adapt to changing conditions. In the future, the authors speculate, a company might structure its entire business using the principles of swarm intelligence. The result, they believe, would be the ultimate self-organizing enterprise--one that could adapt quickly and instinctively to fast-changing markets.