Is the United States military behind the curve? Dr. John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, believes so. "[Our] big ships, big guns, and big battalions…are sure to be the wrong approach to waging the wars of the future." He offers a way to get ahead of the curve: "[I]f we build a more networked force, it will already be able to fight at the regular level, and I believe that it will be able to scale up very nicely to fight the bigger wars."
Military historian Victor Hanson agrees, for the most part. Hanson and Arquilla discuss the challenges of waging war in the modern globalized world. It is a military environment in which, John Arquilla argues, "'many and small' beats 'few and large'," "finding matters more than flanking," and "swarming is the new surging." Arquilla and Hanson discuss these tactics in light of American experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bio
John Arquilla
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, Dubious Battles, and From Troy to Entebbe, 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.
Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and military historian, professor of classics, and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of more than a dozen and a half books. His most recent volumes are Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, which Dr. Hanson edited, and The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern, a volume of Dr. Hanson's own essays.
Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007, the Claremont Institute's Statesmanship Award at its annual Churchill Dinner, and the $250,000 Bradley prize from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in 2008.
Peter Robinson
Peter M. Robinson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he writes about business and politics, edits the Hoover Institution's quarterly journal, the Hoover Digest, and hosts Hoover's television program, "Uncommon Knowledge."
Robinson is also the author of three books: How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life; It's My Party: A Republican's Messy Love Affair with the GOP; and the best-selling business book Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA.
In warfare, coordinated application of all the forces of a nation to achieve a goal. In contrast to tactics, strategy's components include a long-range view, the preparation of resources, and planning for the use of those resources before, during, and after an action. The term has expanded far beyond its original military meaning. As society and warfare have steadily grown more complex, military and nonmilitary factors have become more and more inseparable in the conduct of war and in programs designed to secure peace. In the 20th century, the term grand strategy, meaning the art of employing all the resources of a nation or coalition of nations to achieve the objects of war (and peace), steadily became more popular in the literature of warfare and statecraft.
Very interesting, but I'm pretty sure the china-taiwan problem will solve itself before it becomes an actuality. China is educating millions of computer engineers and scientists, that censorship firewall of theirs wont stand a chance. Soon they'll be dealing with the same popular deterrence that the west is.
member. 
