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Op-ed: How ‘swarming’ is transforming the battlefield —Ahmad Faruqui

Swarming may play a decisive role in future battles but it is far from clear which side will use it more effectively. Swarming is not a capital-intensive activity and that is why the terrorists are deploying it to great advantage against the superpower

It remains unclear that the US will achieve its political objectives in Iraq any time soon, if it ever does achieve them. US casualties in Iraq, as the war enters its eighth month, now exceed the number of casualties that the US experienced in the first three years of the Vietnam War. Washington is ripe with rumours about a decision to withdraw US forces from Iraq by June, given that the president comes up for re-election in November. While senior officials of the Bush administration have denied these rumours, there is no doubt that the administration is engaged in serious soul searching about the best policy to take vis-à-vis Iraq.

While many analysts continue to doubt the wisdom of the US decision to attack Iraq without UN backing, there are few who would deny that militarily the US achieved a major military success by deposing the regime of Saddam Hussein within the short span of three weeks. Two years earlier, the US military had dispatched the Taliban regime in Kabul in a couple of month’s time.

How was the US able to achieve these victories with such lightening speed? Some have attributed them to the ability of the US to deploy overwhelming firepower against its foes, something that would have been difficult to do if a countervailing superpower such as the former Soviet Union had been around. Others have credited the US military victory to the operatives of the CIA, who carried out a carefully crafted psychological operation with offers of money, new identity and US citizenship to key members of the opposing regimes. However, a third factor may have been equally important in securing battlefield success. This is a war-fighting concept known as ‘swarming’.

The term swarming has been borrowed from the world of biology, based on how bees attack their victims. Bees use their ‘humming’ to instinctively move in coordinated synchronous behaviour. A recent article in Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine defines swarming as “a seemingly amorphous but carefully structured, coordinated way to strike from all directions at a particular point or points, by means of a sustainable ‘pulsing’ of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions.”

The aim of swarming is to bring forces rapidly and stealthily on a target, carry out the attack, then regroup immediately afterwards to inject a new pulse.

It is important to note that throughout history, armies have used swarming tactics in varying ways. For example, its key feature — omnidirectional attack — was put to great use by the mounted forces of the early Muslim armies in the 7th century and by the Mongols in the 13th century. Variations of the swarming tactic have been used in battles ranging from the Roman Punic Wars in ancient times to the Zulu Wars in the nineteenth century to the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War. The Royal Air Force swarmed its Spitfires from dispersed airfields all over southeastern England to harass massed incoming Luftwaffe formations during the Battle of Britain. At sea, German U-boats were widely distributed when scouting for allied convoys, then converging to attack them in force.

One of the world’s leading authorities on swarming is Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a consultant to the RAND Corporation based in Santa Monica, California. Reviewing the military history of swarming, he says that over time swarming tactics fell in disfavour as bigger and more advanced weapons of war were inducted into the armed forces. However, the arrival of a surprisingly innocuous technology — mobile communications — has rehabilitated swarming.

Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, agrees that swarming has been reborn. He says that mobile communications technology serves the same function as what ‘buzzing’ accomplishes for bees. The bees sense each other’s buzzing and instinctually move in concert in real time. Text messaging on mobile devices and instantaneous file sharing off the Internet via personal digital assistants (PDAs) allows groups of people to receive their instructions, move in unison, nearly instantaneously, without prior planning or forethought.

Thus, what is new about swarming is the use of advanced sensing, communication and weapons guidance technologies. These make it possible to use swarming tactics in any terrain against any type of opponent around the clock, something that was not possible in earlier times.

Swarming has non-military applications as well. The protestors at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999 orchestrated urban chaos by pulsing, which is the ability of groups of people to come together, disperse to safety and reform in new groups. The RAND Corporation points out that pulsing makes crowd control very difficult because it keeps ‘rearranging the threats’ and that there is no prearranged pattern that police can analyse and neutralise.

While the American military remains officially wedded to its ‘Air-Land Battle’ doctrine, its latest field campaigns exhibit the beginnings of a potential ‘Battle-Swarm’ doctrine. In Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, slightly more than 300 Special Forces soldiers, who were networked with each other and with various air-based attack assets, quickly toppled the Taliban. These same elites did it again in Iraq, striking all over the country from the outset, saving the oilfields in the south, knocking out the Scuds deployed in the west, coordinating with the Kurds in the north and securing the approaches to Baghdad.

The challenge facing the US is that terrorist groups are also utilising swarming tactics and one might even say they got their first. This was in evidence when they converged on four separate targets simultaneously on September 11, 2001 and when they carried out coordinated attacks in Kenya, Yemen, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. To effectively fight terrorists, Arquilla believes the US will have to change its military strategy from focusing on big-ticket items like planes and submarines to building up a decentralised, web-based intelligence network.

While swarming may well play a decisive role in deciding the fate of future battles, it is far from clear as to which side will be able to use it more effectively. Swarming is not a terribly capital-intensive activity and that is why the terrorists are deploying it to great advantage against the world’s sole superpower.

The US has used it effectively against established regimes in Kabul and Baghdad but judging from Secretary Rumsfeld’s leaked memo of a couple of weeks ago, even he is not convinced that the US is winning the war against terrorists.

Moreover, in the final analysis, wars will not be won with superior military tactics. The side that is able to win over the hearts and minds of the people will win them.

Dr Ahmad Faruqui is an economist and author of “Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan”. He can be reached at faruqui@pacbell.net

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