NETWORKING / Joystick World / Outgaming Osama

Defense intellectuals such as Linton Wells II, a deputy assistant secretary of defense responsible for command, control, communications and intelligence, believe that the Pentagon must realign itself for "network-centric" operations.
In their view, adversaries such as bin Laden's al Qaeda group are really networks -- highly dispersed units that have the same loose but robust structure as the nodes of a computer network.
The intellectual groundwork for this "netwar" analysis was laid out in a paper published on the Internet in October 2001 by two Rand analysts, David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla. "It takes networks to fight networks," they argued.
But it has been difficult to imagine what these anti-network networks might look like.
That's why the massive online games are so intriguing. The ability to connect hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously opens the possibility for sharing information, tasking both combatants and civilian rescue workers and "pulsing" adversaries with counterattacks.