When the U.S. military was battling terrorist insurgencies in Iraq in 2004, Gen. Stanley McChrystal observed that the task force newly under his command had more in common with “a Fortune 500 company trying to fight off a swarm of start-ups” than with the Allied command battling Nazi Germany in World War II. The insurgents, mainly al Qaeda, were succeeding not because they were superbly trained or brilliant tacticians but because their nonhierarchical structures embodied a fundamentally different manner of waging war.
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