Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

SUNDAY OPINION: "The Coming Swarm," by John Arquilla, New York Times, 15 February 2009.

Arquilla is very good, but like a lot of high-tech war gurus who've now switched over to the long war, he tends toward the fantastically dark, where "nightmare scenarios" are the norm.

Everything we see abroad is now routinely predicted to be showing up on our shores any day now. Remember when IEDs were coming to America? Now, we are told to expect re-runs of the Mumbai attacks, except, of course, we've suffered the Columbine-style attacks by crazed gunmen for years and years now.

The fear, naturally, is that this tactic will now be married to political purpose instead of just adolescent death-wish fantasies.

The hold-up on this scenario is two-fold: 1) the Muslims we attract don't come here for that sort of stuff but for economic opportunity and religious tolerance, meaning--so far--the legendary sleeper cells of radical Islam exist mostly on cable TV and in movies; and 2) we've been pretty good at breaking up groups of bad actors who've been sent here.

But Arquilla's logic in this piece is well-reasoned: the future of such warfare will be the disposable and cheap, not the few and the ridiculously expensive. I've been preaching that for years re: our military, and as the conflict inevitably comes more to our neck of the woods over time, that logic likewise makes sense for whatever police and counter-terror assets we muster here. So Arquilla's suggestion that we fund all sorts of small-team responders who are just good enough to handle the situation versus racing around with super-trained high-tech squads strikes me as highly practical. In this solid op-ed, Arquilla argues that this is just a domestic version of the COIN logic that worked in Iraq: get out of the big bases, end the isolation, and stay close to the people--the strategic corporal recast as the strategic cop-on-the-beat. When they swarm, we do the same.

Again, very sensible stuff, especially for a populace as heavily armed and as eager to use its weaponry as ours is.