# John Arquilla **Entity class:** Person; strategist of information-age and networked conflict ## Definition **John Arquilla** is a strategist and professor emeritus of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School whose work spans irregular warfare, terrorism, information operations, special operations, and information-age security. With [[wiki/David Ronfeldt|David Ronfeldt]], he developed the concept of [[wiki/Netwar|netwar]] and co-edited *[[wiki/Networks and Netwars|Networks and Netwars]]*. ## Why This Person Is Included Arquilla gives the predictive-graph collection a strategic genealogy. Before graph neural networks, embeddings, and streaming knowledge graphs, Arquilla and Ronfeldt argued that information-age conflict required analysts to understand distributed networks rather than only conventional hierarchies. Bryant McGill includes him because the contemporary [[wiki/Counterterrorism Predictive Graph|Counterterrorism Predictive Graph]] extends a decades-long turn toward relations, flows, swarming, and network-aware conflict. ## Relationships - **co-developed:** [[wiki/Netwar|Netwar]] with [[wiki/David Ronfeldt|David Ronfeldt]]. - **concepts:** [[wiki/Networks and Netwars|Networks and Netwars]], [[wiki/Swarming|Swarming]], [[wiki/Information Operations|Information Operations]], and [[wiki/Network-Centric Conflict|Network-Centric Conflict]]. - **collection role:** historical network-strategy precursor in [[wiki/Intellectual Neighborhood of the Counterterrorism Collection|Intellectual Neighborhood of the Counterterrorism Collection]]. ## Sources / Provenance - [Naval Postgraduate School, Information Strategy Research Center, “About”](https://nps.edu/web/isrc/about) (accessed 2026-09-23). - [RAND, *Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy*](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/www/external/congress/terrorism/phase1/netwars.pdf) (2001). **As of:** 2026-09-23