Phil Carter at Intel Dump is writing, depressingly and acutely, about the apparent metastasis of al-Qaeda into an even more decentralized network of networks, the element of theater in the Istanbul bombings, and their relationship to Iraq. Carter references, in this connection, the RAND work on Networks and Netwars. I heard a lot about this stuff, when I was eating DARPA's bread and salt --- or rather, the military-industrial complex being what it is, I saw a lot of talk about it. This didn't exactly encourage me to study the work, but now I think I should.
I don't think I've plugged Intel Dump before, so let me take the opprotunity to do so; it's very good, and, unlike me, Carter does a good job of clearly separating what his sources report, his professional analysis of events, and his personal evaluations. The only source of war news which depresses me more regularly than Carter's is Juan Cole's Informed Comment, which might have something to do with the fact that both of them know what they're talking about.
(Carter lives in LA, which leads him to often link to interesting-sound Los Angeles Times articles, as in those three posts. Unfortunately, their website has the most bizarrely intrusive registration procedure of any newspaper site I've seen --- a procedure which hasn't worked for me on three separate occassions. If this is some ploy to encourage me to buy a hard copy of the paper, it is not working.)