War theories

Watch this. It’s John Arquilla and Victor Davis Hanson talking about developments in warfare with Peter Robinson. Some of the conversation is about Iraq and how things went between the invasion in ‘03 and the Surge in ‘07. Hanson makes the point that attrition played a huge role in making the Surge possible. I would add that the middle period was also needed so that the U.S. could get to know all of the customers in the saloon, so to speak.

Allow me to unashamedly segue to my thing.

I’m going to go slightly off message about Corpse in Armor, my new novel, a counterterrorism thriller. Amidst all of the action and the mind-bending story is a theory of asymmetrical warfare that seeps up through the tale and should scare the hell out of you. Much of the war-fighting takes place from a “cloud” — like the one discussed in the video with Hanson and Arquilla — but it is an even more rarefied cloud than the one they discuss. Way more software than hardware, would be a way of putting it.

This is the war we are fighting, right now. Note that one of the central characters in Corpse in Armor, Ryan Schell, spent five years in Iraq.