New rules of war with Hanson and Arquilla

19 Mar 2010

Speakers: John Arquilla, Victor Davis Hanson, Peter M Robinson

Is the United States military behind the curve? John Arquilla 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.”

Victor Hanson agrees, for the most part. Hanson and Arquilla discuss the challenges of waging war in the modern globalised 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 the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.