This is not the follow-up to the previous post that you may be awaiting, just an excursus on war stories. Those of you who are interested in SF/Fantasy may already have come across Adam Roberts' attempt to give literary expression to the swarm, in New Model Army. In it, the reader is told about future social struggles waged by democratic armies, swarms organised by principles wholly different from those of traditional armies. Here is a relevant passage:

"To summarise, then. Let's say our eight thousand men[!], coordinating themselves via their wikis, voting on a dozen on-the-hoof strategic propositions, utilizing their collective cleverness and experience (instead of suppressing it under the lid of feudal command) - that our eight thousand, because they had drawn on all eight thousand as a tactical resource as well as a fighting force - had thoroughly defeated an army three times our size. Let's say they had a dozen armoured- and tank-cars; and air support; and bigger guns, and better and more weapons. But let's say they were all trained only to do what they were told, and their whole system depending on the military feudalism of a traditional army, made them markedly less flexible; and that each soldier could only do one thing where we could do many things.
"Anyway, we beat them.
"Here's something else: they couldn't believe we had beaten them, even long after we had done it. I don't mean 'they couldn't believe it!' as a periphrasis for general astonishment. I mean they literally could not believe it. It did not seem real to them. Something was wrong somewhere, and the wrongness must be somewhere else than the feudal logic of old-style military thinking (they outnumbered us by so much! They were better armed by so much! They were a professional experienced army! And so on). But we beat them for all that.
"There were three hours, give or take, of further fighting, although it was intermittent and we neither killed nor were killed in large numbers. They held out that long, I suppose, hoping that reinforcements could be sent up from Deepcut, where another Regular Army corps was fighting another NMA. But neither that force, nor the much larger body of men and machine to the north, was free to come to their aid. After it became apparent that nobody was coming the battle wound itself up smartly. We selected a dozen negotiators - some NMAs like to decide on negotiators before battle, but I've always thought that a short-sighted thing to do (what if they get killed or wounded in combat? It takes no time to have the wiki randomly identify a dozen troopers, and we're all, more or less, equally capable when it comes to such negotiations.) Our negotiators went in and talked to the surviving ranking officers, and terms were agreed. We confiscated their remaining cars, and took some civilian automobiles as well; and then we loaded up the weapons we had seized into those and took them away.
"We had a quick wiki debate about what to do with these two thousand unarmed men, some wounded (some wounded badly) and some not. If our enemy had been like us, their well men would have tended their unwell and everything would have gone better for them; but since it was a feudal force it depended upon specialized medics to look after the sick. Of course it is in the nature of such specialists that there are always too many of them, with not enough to do, in peacetime; and always too few, with too much to handle, in battle.

...

[After success in battle, the new model army prepares to ship out.]
"We are at our weakest when it comes to mass transit of this sort. It's not what we are best at doing. Moving in swarm, thousands of individuals making their own myriad ways, is our natural mode of transport. Moving en masse puts us in danger. But I do not offer this to you as a tip, since if pressured tactically at such a moment - should you, in plain language, see to take advantage of that situation - we can easily eliminate the problem by killing our prisoners and dispersing ourselves. We would prefer not to, but it is an option available to us: and in that case the problem is removed. The only difficulty would be in killing such a large body of people quickly enough not to be disadvantage tactically; but here the nature of NMA combat structures - the fluid and rhizomatic nature - was on our side. A feudal army would, I suppose, select a number of men as an execution detail, and work methodically through the mass of prisoners. But we were all armed, and there were more of us than the prisoners; so once the vote was taken it would be a simple matter for each member of the NMA to pick a prisoner, dispatch him, such that it would all be over with a single boomingly multi-tracked gunshot. We are all equally capable, and responsible." (Adam Roberts, New Model Army, 2010, pp. 35-7 & 42)

The new model army is, as you see, a network without hierarchy (not all networks are necessarily so); an emergent intelligence, connected by real-time peer-to-peer connections; a democratic Leviathan, made possible by the internet and the wiki. It is the swarm. And now here is Hardt & Negri's version of the swarm:

In its way another adventure story-cum-political treatise, in Multitude the military metaphor is once more to the fore. The same insurgent advantages tend to be inferred from swarm motifs. "It is very difficult to hunt down a swarm", Hardt and Negri tell us (p. 57). Equally, the swarm cannot be decapitated. Like Roberts' giant, the swarm is headless. (Ibid). It is also, as you see, a networked intelligence, a centre-less structure which, however disordered it appears from the outside, is cohesive and orderly: "each local struggle functions as a node that communicates with all the other nodes without any hub or centre of intelligence". (p217) But this narrative lacks certain advantages relative to Roberts'. It must, perforce, try to find its protaganist, the Pantegral, the democratic Leviathan, immanent in real world situations. It's like a search for Big Foot - someone saw a glimpse of him in Palestine (where resistance was centrally directed), a friend spotted him in Mexico (Zapatismo has its hierarchies), I saw him on the internet. (Actually, the internet, and particularly open source software development, which Hardt and Negri take to be similar to the distributed network, looks more like the traditional hierarchical protagonist than they realise). There is more. Its narrative pretext is the complete absence of the revolutionary strategic parameters that might allow one to attack, say, a weak link in the chain - there is no chain, no weak link, no centre of power. Power lies both everywhere and nowhere. So they cannot stage this encounter between the swarm and the old centralised, top-down, upright, phallic feudal army without contradiction. Hence, they do contradict themselves, or at least prevaricate. There may be centres of power, after all - but perhaps they're a relic of the old order - or perhaps not. Narrative problems like this erode the plausibility of the narrative, and it becomes difficult to suspend disbelief.