Swarming (military)
In such situations, swarming involves the use of a decentralized force against an opponent, in a manner that emphasizes mobility, communication, unit autonomy and coordination or synchronization.
Biologically driven forms are often complex adaptive systems, but have no central planning, simple individual rules, and nondeterministic behavior that may or may not evolve with the situation.
[citation needed] Mongols under Genghis Khan practiced an equivalent of swarming, partially because their communications, which used flags, horns, and couriers, were advanced for the time.
Swarming was present in the operations of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, but were generally replaced by melee and mass in the pre-industrial era.
[4] They define swarming, in a military context, as "...seemingly amorphous, but it is a deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions, by means of a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions."
[5] This paper suggests abandoning the term command and control in favor of Agility is a characteristic of an organization or unit capable of swarming.
[8] Howard Rheingold cites mobile communications technology as a key enabler: The bees sense each other's buzzing and instinctually move in concert in real time.
In the 1980s, the Soviets developed an 'Operational Maneuver Group' (OMG) for a fast armored thrust deep into NATO defences east of the Rhine River.
An OMG was expected to exploit strategic surprise with a force equal or greater than an armored division, featuring up to 700 tanks, 500 IFVs, and a substantial number of helicopters.
The SMA, known as the Dragoon, was evaluated and highly praised by the MoD's test pilots at Boscombe Down, its STOL performance and ease of handling making it ideal for this role.
The proposal was published in the Journal of the Royal United Service Institution and a couple of years later a shorter article suggested that if the Soviets themselves had used SMAs in swarms in Afghanistan their COIN operations against the Mujaheddin would have been far more successful.
[11] Contemporary Western armies in Afghanistan can readily accept that swarming at the tactical and operational levels is appropriate, but the physical structure of the country rules out the currently available fighting vehicles.
However, networked and swarming SMAs, again 5,000 in number, all armed with laser designators for the second echelon of conventional ground attack aircraft, would constitute force multipliers with a substantial impact.
A swarming case is any historical example in which the scheme of manoeuvre involves the convergent attack of five (or more) semiautonomous (or autonomous) units on a targeted force in some particular place.
"[1] Due to the vulnerability of sophisticated air defense systems such as S-300 and S-400 to mass attacks from low flying cruise missiles, it is thought that swarm tactics are well suited for Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) missions using swarms of networked miniature spoofing decoy drones accompanying large numbers of JASSM-ER cruise missiles launched from mass fire platforms such as Rapid Dragon.
[12][13] Prevention of fratricide, as well as the ability to make ad hoc swarming attacks on targets of opportunity, is one of the major goals of combat data networking among units down to the level of individual tanks and soldiers.
In that model, which needs extensive lead time, the major power uses nonmilitary and military means to increase the capability of the host nation to resist insurgency.
In a reasonably peaceful situation, he describes a "system administrator" force, often multinational, which does what some call "nation-building", but, most importantly, connects the nation to the core and empowers the natives to communicate—that communication can be likened to swarm coordination.
Leviathan may use extensive swarming at the tactical level, but its dispatch is a strategic decision that may be made unilaterally, or by an established core group such as NATO, ASEAN, or the United Nations.
It is the job of the system administrator force to deal with low-level conflict, and there must be both resources and a smooth transition plan from Leviathan to System Administrator responsibility, of which a classic successful example were the Operation Rankin plans that covered several ways in which Nazi power might end[17] which is more a mission for police, which certainly can include a militarized force like the Constabulary in the post-WWII occupation of Germany.
[20] Al-Qaeda, for example, uses a different form of swarming than those of advanced militaries, in which the general objectives of operational cells are agreed in a manner coordinated, but not continuously controlled by the core organization.
Once the decision has been made on the general targets, the operational cells cut positive control links from the core, although they may still receive financial and other support.
While John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, cites the ability to plan separate and widely dispersed attacks, coordinated by mobile communications that might originate from a cave on the Afghan-Pakistan border,[8] he does not emphasize the apparent al-Qaeda technique of releasing operational units to local control, once the policy is set.
