Smaller is better

That's one of the mantras of John Arquilla in the current issue of Foreign Policy. Arquilla, who teaches at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, has been urging our armed services to adopt new ways of thinking and fighting for quite a while. In this article he argues that we are really geared to fight wars featuring big battles rather than the wars that we are actually involved in wherein the enemy fights in small groups.

Having small groups usually means that you can have many of them. For example, the Viet Cong had hundreds of thousands of AK-47s they could use at just about any time; we relied a lot on B-52s trying to bomb the Cong into submission. The 21st century example he uses is the thousands of IEDs (22 are built every day) vs. the periodic attack of the drones. Arquilla attributes the problem to the current thinking which is really still living in the past and has a hard time believing that smaller groups of troops who are networked to other groups and attack aircraft could do a better job and at less cost. Another example Arquilla refers to is the November 2008 attack on Mumbai where 10 guys were able to withstand the Indian forces for three days and were also able to kill 160 people.

It's possible that the only way to get the brass to start thinking differently is to freeze their budget. Gee, haven't you heard that recently?