"We know we're killing a lot, capturing a lot, collecting arms ... We just don't know yet whether that's the same as winning." The world's governments and militaries have a striking inability to absorb and apply lessons learned. Guerrilla groups and terrorist organizations, on the other hand, learn lessons very well. In any military operation it is essential to acquire, coordinate, analyze, and disseminate "actionable intelligence." Here, the United States has fallen far short of the mark in Iraq. There will always be a fundamental asymmetry in the dynamic between insurgency and counterinsurgency. The Iraqi insurgency today appears to have no clear leader, no ambition to seize and actually hold territory, no unifying ideology, and, most important, no identifiable organization. What we find in Iraq is the closest manifestation yet of "netwar." MemeStreams is a weapons system. Plan of Attack, by Bruce Hoffman | The Atlantic | July/August 2004 | 
