From the small bands of wilderness warriors who battled in 18th-century North America to the "Chechen Lion," and the contemporary conflict in Chechnya, John Arquilla chronicles the deadly careers of the greatest masters of irregular warfare over the past 250 years. Their impact on events has been profound, with irregulars playing crucial roles in such epochal struggles as the Anglo-French duel for North America, the defeat of Napoleon in Spain and Russia, the American Civil War, both world wars, and the current era of terrorism. Seeing the world through the eyes of guerrillas, raiders and bandits, Arquilla has written an alternative history that provides lessons for warfare in our time that must not be ignored.

The factors leading to the defeat of the Axis Powers in World War II have been debated for decades. One prevalent view is that overwhelming Allied superiority in materials and manpower doomed the Axis. Another holds that key strategic and tactical blunders lost the war--from Hitler halting his panzers outside Dunkirk, allowing more than 300,000 trapped Allied soldiers to escape, to Admiral Yamamoto falling into the trap set by the U.S. Navy at Midway. Providing a fresh perspective on the war, this study challenges both views and offers an alternative explanation: the Germans, Japanese and Italians made poor design choices in ships, planes, tanks and information security--before and during the war--that forced them to fight with weapons and systems that were too soon outmatched by the Allies. The unprecedented arms race of World War II posed a fundamental "design challenge" the Axis powers sometimes met but never mastered.

The information revolution--which is as much an organizational as a technological revolution--is transforming the nature of conflict across the spectrum: from open warfare, to terrorism, crime, and even radical social activism. The era of massed field armies is passing, because the new information and communications systems are increasing the lethality of quite small units that can call in deadly, precise missile fire almost anywhere, anytime. In social conflicts, the Internet and other media are greatly empowering individuals and small groups to influence the behavior of states. Whether in military or social conflicts, all protagonists will soon be developing new doctrines, strategies, and tactics for swarming their opponents--with weapons or words, as circumstances require. Preparing for conflict in such a world will require shifting to new forms of organization, particularly the versatile, hardy, all-channel network. This shift will prove difficult for states and professional militaries that remain bastions of hierarchy, bound to resist institutional redesign. They will make the shift as they realize that information and knowledge are becoming the key elements of power. This implies, among other things, that Mars, the old brute-force god of war, must give way to Athena, the well-armed goddess of wisdom. Accepting Athena as the patroness of this information age represents a first step not only for preparing for future conflicts, but also for preventing them.

In our view, the information-age conflict spectrum looks like this: What we term cyberwar will be an ever-more-important entry at the military end, where the language is normally about high-intensity conflict (HIC) and middle-range conflict (MRC). Netwar will figure increasingly at the societal end, where the language is normally about low-intensity conflict (LIC) and operations other than war (OOTW a broader concept than LIC that includes peacekeeping and humanitarian relief operations). Whereas cyberwar will usually see formal military forces pitted against each other, netwar is more likely to involve nonstate, paramilitary, and other irregular forces. Both concepts are consistent with the views of analysts like Van Creveld (1991) who believe that a transformation of war is under way, leading to increased irregularization. The terms above reflect two assumptions (or propositions) about the information revolution. One is that conflicts will increasingly depend on, and revolve around, information and communications cyber -matters, broadly defined. Indeed, both cyberwar and netwar are modes of conflict that are largely about knowledge about who knows what, when, where, and why, and about how secure a society,

Strategy, at its best, knits together ends and means, no matter how various and disparate, into a cohesive pattern. In the case of a U.S. information strategy, this requires balancing the need to guard and secure access to many informational capabilities and resources, with the opportunity to achieve national aims by fostering as much openness as practicable. The authors' term to represent such strategic balancing is guarded openness. They go on to describe noopolitik (nu-oh-poh-li-teek)--an emerging form of statecraft that emphasizes the importance of sharing ideas and values globally, principally through the exercise of persuasive soft power rather than traditional military hard power. This study discusses the opportunities that may be raised by the emergence of noopolitik--ranging from construction of a noosphere (a globe-spanning realm of the mind) to recommendations that, for example, the U.S. military should begin to develop its own noosphere (among and between the services, as well as with U.S. allies). In the area of international cooperation, the authors offer strategic approaches for improving the capacity of state and nonstate actors to work together to address transnational problems. In addition, the authors recommend specific doctrinal developments, implied by the emergence of information strategy--including the pressing need to deal with such ethical concerns as the first use of information weapons, concepts of proportional response, and the need to maintain the immunity of noncombatants. Ultimately, the authors call for an innovative turn of mind as policymakers and strategists rethink how best to adapt to the epochal transformations being wrought by the information revolution.

New technologies are changing how we protect our citizens and wage our wars. Among militaries, everything taken for granted about the ability to maneuver and fight is now undermined by vulnerability to “weapons of mass disruption”: cutting-edge computer worms, viruses, and invasive robot networks. At home, billions of household appliances and other “smart” items that form the Internet of Things risk being taken over, then added to the ranks of massive, malicious “zombie” armies. The age of Bitskrieg is here, bringing vexing threats that range from the business sector to the battlefield. In this new book, world-renowned cybersecurity expert John Arquilla looks unflinchingly at the challenges posed by cyberwarfare – which he argues have been neither met nor mastered. He offers fresh solutions for protecting against enemies that are often anonymous, unpredictable, and capable of projecting force and influence vastly disproportionate to their size, strength, or wealth. The changes called for require radical rethinking of military and security affairs, diplomacy, and even the routines of our daily lives.

Counterproliferation strategies should be informed by an objective understanding of the motivations of proliferating states. This report applies an exploratory methodology for developing alternative models of the reasoning of national leaders considering acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. It can be used for analysis or as a mechanism for group discussion. It assumes that the leaders in question strive for rational decisionmaking by considering the most-likely, best-case, and worst-case outcomes of various options. That is, they reflect at least limited rationality by considering a range of options and by looking at the upside and downside of those options, as well as best-estimate outcomes. The models allow ample opportunity for "errors," however, by recognizing problems associated with recognizing and evaluating options. They also recognize that psychological and organizational factors can introduce biases and other types of misjudgment. The approach draws on Davis-Arquilla methods developed earlier for use in crisis work.

Swarming is a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to perform military strikes from all directions. It employs a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire that is directed from both close-in and stand-off positions. It will work best--perhaps it will only work--if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. This calls for an organizational redesign--involving the creation of platoon-like pods joined in company-like clusters--that would keep but retool the most basic military unit structures. It is similar to the corporate redesign principle of flattening, which often removes or redesigns middle layers of management. This has proven successful in the ongoing revolution in business affairs and may prove equally useful in the military realm.

Netwar-like cyberwar-describes a new spectrum of conflict that is emerging in the wake of the information revolution. Netwar includes conflicts waged, on the one hand, by terrorists, criminals, gangs, and ethnic extremists; and by civil-society activists (such as cyber activists or WTO protestors) on the other. What distinguishes netwar is the networked organizational structure of its practitioners-with many groups actually being leaderless-and their quickness in coming together in swarming attacks. To confront this new type of conflict, it is crucial for governments, military, and law enforcement to begin networking themselves.