A professor and chair of the Defense Analysis department at the Naval Postgraduate School, John Arquilla coined the term "netwar" to describe the nature and activity of non-state actors that take advantage of information-age capabilities and increasingly use decentralized network structure to organize themselves.
Arquilla first identified the netwar framework in a RAND report "The Advent of Netwar," co-authored with David Ronfeldt in 1996. The two further developed the concept in their 2001 book Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy in which they explain how the information age not only introduced new forms of weapons and targeting (cyberwarfar) but also changed the way terrorist groups and others organize themselves, using information technology to facilitate dispersed activities. Netwar actors, they claim, communicate virtually to organize themselves into three types of network structures: chain networks (end-to-end communication, used primarily in smuggling operations), hub/star networks (used in terrorist networks and drug cartels) and all-channel collaborative networks like those used in peace groups.
Source: The Advent of Netwar, RAND 1996
Arquilla argues that networks will be the next major form of organization in society and that in order to counter the threat from non-hierarchical organizations that use "swarming" attacks, militaries must restructure as networked organizations that can more readily react to the fluid nature of decentralized groups.
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