William Gibson nails (so to speak) the problem of conventional warfare against assymetrical warfare. He manages to say it all in his blog post title:

Hammer, Meet Wasp’s Nest

Then he explains why certain countries (U.S., Israel, U.K.) keep trying to solve a fourth generational warfare problem with conventional cold war solutions:

Myself, I keep going back to my no doubt sloppy and imperfect understanding of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. If the theory of “fourth generation war” is viewed as a new paradigm (and it seems to me to meet the criteria) then this is more than a failure of perception on the part of neoconservatives.

HAMMER, MEET WASP’S NEST William Gibson, Saturday, July 29, 2006

Gibson quotes Wikipedia’s writeup on Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts to describe how the mindsets before and after a paradigm shift are not compatible or even commensurate. They don’t use the same metrics; they don’t even agree on what are the right questions to ask; they can’t be translated. Continue reading →