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No commander is less fortunate than he who operates with a telegraph wire stuck in his back.--Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke
[¶3.] From Agamemnon before the walls of Troy to General Schwarzkopf at the border of Iraq, military commanders have had to deal not only with leadership, authority, strategy, morale, and tactics, but the more down-to-earth details of information, communication, physical movement, and supply. Although particular attention is always paid to the unique qualities of leadership and inspiration that make great commanders, social historians are always careful to emphasize as well those qualities needed to organize, supply, and direct an army in the particular social and economic environment of the times.1
[¶4.] Because military organizations bear many similarities to civil ones in the differentiation of task and equipment and the growing scope and scale of their operations, the other functions of "command" in modern military organizations are very similar to those performed by "management" in the more familiar world of business and economics.2 Because they both share the problem of integrating, coordinating, and maintaining control in the face of growing complexity of the organization itself, the environment in which it operates, and the means by which information and other forms of intelligence are gathered and managed, both have a growing demand for improvements in C3 I--command, control, communications, and intelligence.
[¶5.] The traditional factory of the nineteenth century was a relatively simple operation to manage. No matter how large, it essentially consisted of many people doing more or less the same thing, using more or less the same kind of machine or tool. A solid block of men moving and fighting together is also relatively simple to command.3 Subdivision into units with different missions, increases the problems of coordination, which continue to grow as the number of units, the differentiation of their weapons and missions, and the space over which they must operate increases. What is often characterized as growing sophistication and professionalism in military as well as civilian organizations can therefore also be described as an increase in formal complexity.4
[¶6.] Given the growth of technical experts and expertise in both domains, it is not surprising that civil and military responses to an increasingly complex operational environment have been similar, and technical. Rather than accepting the necessity to cope with the irreducible increase in uncertainty brought about by complexity, military bureaucracies and organizations, like their civil counterparts, have turned to computers and information systems as a panacea, hoping through the use of elaborate models and networks of integrated communications to defeat uncertainty through various methods and modes of positive control.
[¶7.] Many of these new technocrats treat command-and-control as if it were a single and indivisible term, or even confuse the one with the other.5 This is in part because of the general tendency of the managerial and business literature to treat control as something of a portmanteau, covering almost any intention or means for seeking the prior determination of outcomes.6 But control properly defined is not the same as management, or command.7 Control involves feedback, learning, and the cumulation of knowledge, for the specific purpose of framing an action in deterministic certainty. Command (like management) is more of a one-way process in the face of irreducible uncertainty, sometimes based on experience, sometimes on heuristics, and sometimes just on "right feeling."
[¶8.] Martin Landau has described the modern organization's search for control as a search for knowledge--empirically verified observations, theories based on them, and predictive models not only of organizational behavior, but of the organization's environment. The key word is "predictive." With a predictive model, and a verified theory, an organization can exercise "control"; it can make precise corrections by comparing feedback from its actions with the predictions of the model. If the organization's knowledge is sufficiently comprehensive, there will be very few unanticipated events around which it has to improvise.
[¶9.] The more complex the organization and its environment, however, the less likely that it will ever be able to behave like a social thermostat. What is needed to cope are people who have the ability to make decisions on the basis of partial knowledge and partial information, openly recognizing the inadequacy of available models and heuristics, and to correct on the fly via a process of trial and error. Instead, many orga-nizations saw in such new management tools as game theory, decision analysis, operations research, and econometric model building a way to substitute predictable formal and analytic skills for managerial (and command) ones that could never be perfectly known, or predicted, in advance.
[¶10.] As noted in chapter 4, the advent of the small, affordable digital computer furthered this trend by allowing the construction of more complex and elaborate models, by vastly increasing the amount of data that could be stored and manipulated, and by running the whole increasingly elaborated and complex process more and more rapidly. In a social and business environment where quantitative analysis and esoteric computer skills were becoming increasingly valued, this tended to have positive feedback, further transferring power within the organization from the traditional managers with their tacit and difficult-to-quantify skills to the new cadre of data and model manipulators.
[¶11.] Modern military officers, trained in and familiar with the techniques and trends of modern schools of business and management, have not behaved much differently. One result for the U.S. military, as for others, was the rise in power and importance of those who sought deterministic models and methods for fighting wars.8 As business and management schools became more familiar with what computers could do, and management theory moved away from determinism and toward "flexible" and "adaptive" control fostered by the ability of those in control to gather and process directly information even from the smallest unit, rather than through middle management, so also did the military. Dreams of being able to cut through the fog of war and intervene directly in the course of battle were evident even before the introduction of computers and the information and data systems they made possible, but they were once held by only a small group of techno-visionaries. Now they have become the dominant vision.
[¶12.] Because of the historically unprecedented rapidity with which the technical systems progressed and developed, the ongoing and potentially productive arguments about how, when, and where the new capabilities might be used were cut short. The United States is now on the verge of being fully committed to a military that is fully interconnected horizontally and vertically, without any real sense of what the increased dependence on information management, data flows, real-time battle management, and other manifestations of the computer transition will do either to organizational structure and behavior or to performance in combat.9
[¶14.] Since the beginning of military history, those seeking to increase their fighting power by increasing the size of their armies have been confounded by the difficulty of coping with the attendant increase in the scope of battle. Without adequate and sufficiently rapid communications, commanders were unable to manage and coordinate large and dispersed forces, let alone to control their actions in battle. The dominant strategies were to plan carefully in advance, depending on order and discipline among the troops, and then to gather what information one could and exercise whatever control was possible through a system of couriers.10 That may have sufficed for armies that still moved slowly and on foot, but was historically inadequate for combat at sea.11
[¶15.] Nor was there any way to coordinate the growth and dispersion of the logistic "tail" needed to supply large armies, which increasingly became independent units foraging on their own. The Romans of the late empire were able to manage and feed their geographically dispersed forces through strict discipline and an elaborate and very sophisticated network of camps and roads, which effectively kept the armies in Roman territory even when out in the field, but that in turn limited their exploits to expansion and defense only along the borders of the empire. In medieval and early modern Europe, as in antiquity, armies tended to be small and highly mobile; logistics away from home (and sometimes even when not away) more often than not consisted of foraging in the countryside, especially when on the move.
[¶17.] The modern problems of logistics, as well as of command-and-control, properly start with the reforms of Frederick the Great in the seventeenth century. Faced with the dual technical and social problems of seeking to make better use of the potential firepower at a time when warfare was growing in scope and scale, he not only introduced standardized uniforms, but standardized methods of training, including formal drill and massed fire. This in turn involved formal separation of function and differentiation of mission, greatly increasing the problems of battle management.
[¶18.] Open order drill and separation of function required intelligence and training of troops and professional military staffs; modern artillery required technical training; the larger armies required conscription, which called for formal standardization. The commander of the army was now also its chief bureaucrat.12 But the preindustrial mass army remained fundamentally uncoordinated until the time of Napoleon and the huge, democratic armies of revolutionary France. Improvements in roads, in communications, and, perhaps most important, in agriculture allowed the larger armies to remain mobile without assigning large parts for supply or foraging.13 Solving the problem of command-and-control, however, was not so simple.
[¶19.] In the time of Napoleon, each component of the Grand Armeé (infantry, cavalry, artillery) was composed of many identical small units such as artillery batteries; formations could continue to fight, at some level, even after sustaining enormous losses. Moreover, their tasks were predesigned, as communication during battle was at best imperfect; they were not only able, but also expected to fight on their own even if communication with commanders was delayed or severed.14
[¶20.] In the language of organization theory, Napoleonic armies, like most of those before them, were formally decomposable. Interdependence between large formations, or between infantry and artillery, may have at times been high, reflecting the need to try to coordinate the battle in an integrated way, but given the poor state of battlefield communications, units at the same level had to be ready to pursue their objectives without coordinating too closely with others.15 Napoleon himself was reluctant to delegate, and centralized command even though he could exercise only the most limited control of a battle once under way. His genius lay with planning, and with the traditional qualities of intuition, insight and, particularly in the earlier years, charismatic leadership. When these ebbed, he was defeated tactically as well as strategically.
[¶21.] The Napoleonic era also saw the birth of total war; in France, the army, the government, and the people had been merged to a single force. But neither Napoleon nor his opponents grasped the organizational or technical implications of the growing industrialization of Europe. Nor, finally, did Clausewitz, who focused almost entirely on the social and political dimensions and remained somewhat indifferent to the effects of technical and economic ones. Nevertheless, it was Clausewitz, writing in an era of growing devotion to rational analysis, who first pointed to the importance of "friction," to the human elements of uncertainty and chance, the "fog of war" that undermines all attempts to carry out rational plans laid in advance.16 The task of the commander was to accept that uncertainty, and to be prepared to master it.
[¶23.] The American Civil War is generally regarded as the first modern "industrial" war, harnessing the newly available productive and technical capabilities of the industrial revolution to the purpose of waging total war. Nearly complete economic and technical as well as social and political mobilization was achieved. The use of the railroad and the telegraph was central, both for logistics and for communications. But the results were mixed. The command-and-control structure of individual battles was not that different from those of the Napoleonic Wars, which had been assiduously and carefully studied by Union and Confederate generals alike. Sherman's march to the sea was the first modern expression of the Clausewitzian notion of total and absolute war, waged against the social and economic structure as well as the troops in the field, but Sherman's army moved autonomously and not under central control.
[¶24.] The real innovator was the often-maligned Ulysses S. Grant. Leaving the charisma of command and the romance of dramatic victories to the Confederacy, Grant adopted from Napoleon and Clausewitz the precept of total war--that the key to victory was annihilation of the enemy and not simply defeat. Rather than seeking decisive battles, or even decisive outcomes in battle, Grant consciously adopted the strategy of using the greater Union resources to wear the Confederacy down.17 Abandoning the notion of trying to exercise direct control, Grant was content to coordinate and plan overall strategy, letting each battle unfold as it would.
[¶25.] European militaries were also undergoing a transition to the modern era of "technological" warfare. Although not so dramatic as the Civil War, the triumph of Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke and the Prussian campaign of 1866 that ended with the defeat of the Austrians and Saxons at Königgrätz (Sadowa in Bohemian) created a new model of the European army. Of the two new innovations, the German general staff and the telegraph, more credit is due to the former than the latter.18 The battle itself was too wide-ranging and diffuse to be controlled by any technology using fixed infrastructure. But it was the first European war of the modern industrial age, using weapons and technical tools derived from the power of steam, the new techniques for producing steel, and the first signs of the coming transformation in communications and information-gathering capabilities.
[¶26.] Better use was made of both telegraph and railroad during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The very existence of the telegraph had already changed the representation of battle for the commander, who now felt more closely coupled to the battlefield, and it was widely believed that the Prussians used telegraphy extensively for integration of the battlefield. But Moltke himself recorded in his memoirs that once battle was joined there was little that he, or the general staff, could do to affect the outcome.19 Furthermore, he had considerable respect for Clausewitz's "fog of war," and exerted strict controls over the flow of information in order to maintain a strong sense of independence and balance among his forces rather than trying to overcontrol them.20
[¶27.] By the time of the First World War, the telegraph was more mature, and in wider use, but the lessons from attempts at integrating communications to couple commanders to the battle front were at best ambivalent. The contribution of the telegraph to the rapidity of the early movement of the German armies through Belgium, or of the independent, motorized taxi fleet that saved France at the Marne, were almost forgotten in the ensuing four years of trench warfare, as immobile technically as it was physically.
[¶28.] The most famous, and disastrous, case of command rigidity was the battle of the Somme in 1916. The British part of the campaign was planned in advance in such detail, and with so little discretionary power given to subordinates, that General Haig and the others at headquarters did not even know for days that it had failed--although the troops on the field knew that within a few hours. Moreover, even if opportunities and breakthroughs did fortuitously occur, they could not have been exploited, because the technical requirements of the artillery had rendered the plan linear and inflexible.21
[¶29.] More of a premium was put on retaining control to assure that the battle went according to the prescheduled timetable than to managing the actual advance toward the German lines. But there was still very little reliable wireless communication; what the armies had available consisted mostly of hard-wired communications that required the time-consuming (and dangerous) laying of copper lines. The requirement to keep in constant touch with headquarters therefore tied the field officers down to their original positions instead of having them advance with the troops. What the British had done was to incorporate modern techniques into a battle plan that was wholly mechanistic, with no means for error detection, let alone error correction, and no flexibility. As van Creveld notes:
The characteristics of the British command system at the Somme are worth summing up, however, since they represent, in as extreme a form as can be found, a school of thought that has adherents from Plato onward. Under this system, carefully laid plans rigorously and undeviatingly carried out are regarded as the one way to overcome the inevitable confusion of the battlefield.22
[¶31.] The plans of the Fourth Army at the Somme were as minutely detailed as they were rigorous. At Waterloo, Wellington did not even have a written battle plan. A century later at the Somme, the British XIII corps alone had thirty-one pages of plans; Queen Victoria's Rifles, with only 1,000 men, had twenty numbered paragraphs. In the words of John Keegan: "It is a spirit not of providing for eventualities, but rather of attempting to preordain the future; a spirit borne out by the language of the orders: `infantry and machine guns will be pushed forward at once . . . the siege and heavy artillery will be advanced.' "23
[¶32.] This the British did, and costly it was. The British troops advanced when they were supposed to, and paused when they were supposed to, moving behind an artillery "barrage" that was simply not accomplishing what the plan had said it would. Moreover, each formation moved straight ahead in its slice of the sector, walking steadily with bayonets fixed, with no communication with units on either side. The lack of ability to lay telegraph wires as the British troops advanced allowed the artillery barrage to keep moving even when the infantry lagged, removing their protective cover and allowing the Germans to rise back up out of their trenches behind it. It was a prescription for disaster, and the disaster was historical. There were 60,000 casualties the first day alone.
[¶33.] That this was a cognitive and not a technical failure is shown by the performance of the German Army in 1918, when it was finally given the discretion to act flexibly and adaptively in a major battle. Using the same basic technical means for signals and communications, the Germans demonstrated a completely different and far more flexible command system in their final offensive, perhaps the most successful on the Western Front during the whole war.24 Planning was to be as detailed as possible, but not to rob front line units of discretion. There were planned "lines" to be attained, but the army was explicitly told these were primarily for the sake of orderly planning and was "encouraged" to do more if they could (and they knew the risk that entailed if it exposed their flanks or supply lines). Commanders were to follow their units and lay communications lines. Observers were to be placed wherever possible. But most important, the outcome of the attack was held to be inherently uncertain, so that the staff prepared to exploit opportunities as they arose, as best they could, and put a heavy emphasis on independent action by subordinate commanders and even by individual soldiers.25
[¶34.] In an era of social and industrial rationalism, the generals on both sides had fallen into the Taylorist trap of believing that reality could be coerced to fit predetermined models, and that what was needed in the face of failure was better and more thorough planning. Military commanders of the First World War were fixed on the notion that the new military techniques provided a means of total control, that better information, better communication, and a better grasp of scientific principles had transformed the uncertain environment of combat into one that could be made formally controllable, even if not totally predictable. The human cost of that rigid and unadaptable belief was the most remembered lesson of that war.
[¶36.] The period between the First and Second World Wars was one of great innovation and technical advancement in a number of militarily relevant fields, such as metallurgy, wireless, and aviation. When the race to re-arm began in the 1930s, militaries drew as much as possible on the interwar developments to build modernized, integrated forces. After the first exploratory years, nearly instantaneous wireless information and communication were used to develop new modes of integration unprecedented in warfare. Submarines at sea and the task forces that hunted them; naval battle groups with integrated air support; the entire air war in Europe and the Far East; the Battle of Britain and the Normandy landings; the rapid, mobile tank battles on the Russian plains and in North Africa all became centrally dependent upon one innovation or another in electronics. Radio communications, command-and-control, and aerial intelligence revolutionized even the ground war, always the last to be subject to innovation.
[¶37.] By the end of the war, the U.S. advance across Europe integrated armor, infantry, and tactical airpower into an enormous combined force of unprecedented power and efficiency. But demands placed on logistics and communications networks were unprecedented, and individual units were growing less capable of fighting independently if logistics or coordination failed. Patton had to stop the advance across France when he outran his supply train; U.S. troops caught in the Battle of the Bulge had to await clear weather for the air-dropped supplies they required.
[¶38.] During and after the war, much emphasis was placed at home on the quality of U.S. equipment and its advanced capabilities, as well as on the quality and morale of its soldiers. In reality, U.S. conduct in the war was primarily a technically augmented extension of the tactics and strategy of Ulysses S. Grant.
[I]t would appear that the U.S. Army, backed by a gigantic productive engine and possibly looking across its shoulder at the organization of an automobile factory, chose to regard war not so much as a struggle between opposing troops, but rather as one whose outcome would be decided largely by machines. Rather than concentrating on fighting power, therefore, it aimed at confronting the enemy with the greatest possible firepower. Not attention to the needs of the soldier, but scientific management and optimum distribution of resources became the name of the game.26
[¶40.] The role of scientific and technical innovation, particularly in the "wizard war" of cryptography, radar, communications, and operations research, was far from negligible,27 but the central war, in Europe, was finally won on the ground, through attrition and industrial dominance. And so was the war in the Pacific. Even the atomic bomb was as much a product of American economic and industrial capability as of Allied scientific and technical ingenuity.28 Both efforts, however, had the effect of moving scientists and engineers into positions of authority, and sometimes power, in military matters that completely and irreversibly changed the relationship between militaries and innovation.29
[¶42.] During the course of the Second World War, increased logistical demand and specialization of function moved the armed forces of the several great powers further from decomposability toward integration. The pooled interdependence that had characterized earlier militaries allowed individual units to fight on their own for long periods. At the beginning, only loose coordination of units was required for effective performance. Toward the end, the U.S. military was already moving toward more demanding sequential interdependence, in which individual units could not perform their functions until some other unit--whether fighting or logistic--had performed a prior one assigned to it. The demands placed on the coordinating and integrating functions of the command-and-control system were thereby greatly increased, but there was still some flexibility in scheduling.
[¶43.] The more technically advanced forces built up after the war gradually began to move to a third kind of interdependence--reciprocal--in which separate units no longer have self-contained tasks that can be autonomously pursued.30 Instead, they must negotiate with each other in "real time" for any of them to perform as designed. But the limits on integrative and analytic power were still not enough to cut through the fog of war. As demonstrated in Korea, units were still "loosely coupled" to each other in organizational terms. If commanders tried to use their new communications power to exercise too much control, if they did not allow room for adjustment and discretion, the outcome was still likely to be disastrous.
[¶44.] The information pathologies produced by centralization in the face of the complexity of unconventional warfare in Vietnam created a kind of informational inertia that infected the entire system. General Heiser of the First Logistic Command wrote that it would be necessary to resort to a less centralized system in the future and to restore service units to their parent outfits, thus doing away with much of the requirement for information even though at the expense of creating some slack resources. In the First World War, the generals had tried to manage uncertainty through planning instead of a working system of command; in Vietnam, they tried with communication and data processing. Once again, van Creveld has the last word: "To study command as it operated in Vietnam is, indeed, almost enough to make one despair of human reason; we have seen the future, and it does not work."31
[¶46.] In the late 1970s, the U.S. Army, faced with the double problem of seeking to remedy the shortcomings demonstrated so clearly in Vietnam and attempting to maintain conventional deterrence in Europe, was charged with rethinking its doctrine. The first attempt, the 1976 revision of the Army's primary training document, Field Manual (FM) 100-5, Operations turned out to be yet another restatement of the traditional doctrine of attrition warfare.32 Critiques by various elements of the military reform movement led to a second revision in 1982, which many felt to be the most extensive change in the fundamentals of U.S. military doctrine since the Civil War.
[¶47.] The initiative that led to the revision had begun even before the advent of the small, powerful digital computer. In July 1970, General William Westmoreland told a congressional committee:
On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located, tracked, and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer-assisted intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control. . . . I am confident [that] the American people expect this country to take full advantage of its technology--to welcome and applaud the developments that will replace wherever possible the man with the machine.33
[¶49.] At the time, there were as yet no technical means to carry out this ambitious agenda. By the 1980s, they were at hand.
[¶50.] The 1982 revision of FM 100-5 rejected attrition in favor of maneuver warfare, introducing not only the concept of fully integrated AirLand Battle, but also the idea of deep interdiction, of striking enemy reserves far behind the front.34 Carrying out such a strategy required the further development of computerized smart weapons and tightly integrated command-and-control networks. But this first attempt at designing a tightly integrated battlefield ran into considerable social and political opposition, here and in Europe, because it was seen as encouraging the early use of nuclear or chemical weapons.
[¶51.] By the early 1980s, the computer revolution was well under way, and the nascent military computing program had evolved into the Strategic Computing Initiative, with ambitious overall goals and three specific program areas: autonomous vehicles, a "smart" pilot's assistant, and battle management.35 The goals of the latter were specifically directed toward information and data processing, as spelled out to Congress in 1983 by DARPA director Robert S. Cooper: ". . . with increasingly massive amounts of valuable data collected, no commander can possibly keep up and make full use of the information, making an accurate picture even less likely . . . revolutionary improvements in computer technology are required."36 This was, of course, the driving purpose behind ARPA's longstanding support of the computer industry.
[¶52.] During the 1970s, the scientific-academic debate over grand strategy, automated systems, and C3 I focused almost entirely on nuclear weapons. By the late 1980s, this had extended to conventional forces and conventional weapons systems, including, inter alia, mathematical equations for combat effectiveness, real-time surveillance and data gathering, computerized control systems, and battlefield integration. In retrospect, these controversies, and the growing interest of the technical and analytic communities in their outcome, were a sign of the rapidity with which the technological transformation was taking place.
[¶53.] Building upon the new research program, FM 100-5 was revised again in 1986 to play down the offensive nature of AirLand Battle and reduce dependence on tightly coupled battlefield integration. Nevertheless, the dependence on computers--for planning, information processing, communication, and battle management--not only remained, but was given greater emphasis. As the U.S. forces scaled down and professionalized, integration, firepower, and efficiency were to compensate for the mass and endurance that could only come from large, conscript armies.
[¶54.] For the military reformers, now cast in the role of traditionalists, there was a remarkable contradiction between the degree of integration and control embedded in FM 100-5 and the U.S. Army's claim to have evaluated, learned from, and adopted the tradition of Auftragstaktik, the spirit of independent fighting and discretion that characterized the German Army since the time of Moltke.37 Within NATO there were complaints that the increased electronic management of battle would greatly reduce the tradition of discretion and freedom of action that was still a basis of officer training in the Bundeswehr. The U.S. response was logical, if disquieting: In the new age of smart weapons and smarter electronics, of integrated battles and combined force operations, a small force trying to fight on its own would not long survive.
[¶55.] Modern integrated combat systems, such as naval battle groups, armored divisions, or tactical air wings, require not only an enormous amount of direct support to keep supplies and spare parts flowing in, and to actually perform repair, but also place increasing demands on information and communications to keep the flows ordered and arranged. Moreover, as the individual weapons become more expensive, and therefore increasingly scarce and valuable, it has become important to control individual decisions. The chain of command exists but often may be superseded by an information and command net capable of reaching past intervening commanders to individual pilots or small unit team leaders. What were once relatively simple military hierarchies that could communicate and coordinate flexibly, fighting together or separately according to the flow of battle, were transformed in the 1980s into a set of rigidly integrated hierarchies connected by electronics. Now they have evolved further into networks of specialized forces whose coherence and integrity must be preserved at all costs to maintain control of the fighting in order to fight at all, let alone to fight effectively.38
[¶56.] For many military systems, increased specialization and consequent functional separation has been accompanied by a set of mutual dependencies that encourage the use of the vastly increased ability of communications equipment to increasingly network and centralize command-and-control. Electronic jamming must take place at the correct moment, and not just in the correct place; artillery and tactical air strikes have to be laid on just at the edge of the battle, and just before ground forces engage. Critical supplies and maintenance must be available just when and where they are needed if the very expensive weapons platforms are not to be useless or immobile. The linkages are now both reciprocal, and "tightly coupled."39
[¶57.] The military reformers of the 1980s were at heart combat line officers, firmly grounded in their belief that "no plan survives contact with the enemy"; they saw their Pentagon counterparts and civil managers as striving not just for innovation, but for deterministic planning and centralized control.40 In the 1990s, even their reforms were absorbed by the promoters of battlefield computer technologies. What is now under way, according to many reports, is a military revolution, based largely on the ability to gather and control the flow of information and use it to integrate and control all aspects of the battle.41 The next war will be a struggle for dominance and control of an information battlespace whose dimensions are measured in wavelengths as well as kilometers, and whose logistics extend to digital data as well as fuel and ammunition.42 The military is indeed moving toward fighting in cyberspace.
[¶59.] As was the case for industrial and financial firms in the civil sector, the new power of computerized information and communication systems transformed not only organizational forms, but the definition, interpretation, and representation of organizational and managerial tasks. Mechanization and integration of the battlefield added to the historical planning and leadership requirements of command the need to organize, coordinate, and manage complex and interdependent sequences. At the same time, increased communications and logistics ability allowed commanders to seek control by tightening links from command centers to combatants, while claiming that the new systems would add to their flexibility and discretion.
[¶60.] With the addition of the new electronic capabilities, the entire, extended battle, from front to logistics, from close air support to strategic interdiction, could now be visualized and managed as a single, integrated whole. Just as the new industrial technologies gave operators more control over immediate task and process, the new weapons have given fighting troops more discretionary power ever at the level of their fighting "task." But in striking parallel to the restraints placed on industrial and office workers by the demands and requirements of their automated and integrated equipment, battlefield commanders now have less discretion than ever at the critical level of operations.
[¶61.] Computerization remains the key. According to U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Gordon Sullivan, "the digitalization of the battlefield--the electronic linking of every weapon system in the Battlespace--will allow the commander to synchronize all the elements of combat power."43 Moreover, the strategies being adopted are not only those of modern business, but have a distinctly Taylorist flavor. What is sought is a fully networked army, with logistics designed "to anticipate and respond just in time to sustainment requirements." As with the similar strategies of the business world discussed in chapter 4, computerization is to substitute tight coupling for resiliency and buffering, and networking is to allow direct control to be exercised remotely from anywhere on the net.44 Moreover, the logic and the feedback are nearly identical to those of the world of business, and very similar to those described in chapter 8 for weapons:
As the leaders' visions are incorporated into doctrine and the organizationally correct position on operations, a positive feedback loop emerges such that up and coming senior officers expect to implement this kind of highly precise warfare. These expectations then channel their control efforts at lower levels of the organization. Just like any [business] managers, they will attempt to distribute people, resources, and tasks across organizational structures, operations, and needs according to these images and assumptions.45
[¶63.] Command was historically an open cycle process: The commander set up the battle, gave instructions, provided for whatever contingencies could be planned for, and then issued the command to execute. After that, the ability to intervene was minimal. In contrast, control is a closed cycle process with feedback, analysis, and iteration; it was not possible even to consider the transition from command to command-and-control until modern technical means for intelligence and communication became available.46 But it is possible, even in the military, to move to control without command.
[¶64.] The problems of modern command-and-control systems are legion. Among those identified are: overconfidence; information overload; high support requirements; overdependence on automated systems; hidden flaws and mistakes in technical systems; the aura of timeliness without its reality; and the illusion of command without its authority.47 For these reasons, the military was at first reluctant to implement computerization completely into the formal process of command; computerized systems were at first intended more for the provision of expert advice than for making decisions. But the embedding of computers into newer military systems such as Aegis or JSTARS makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between advice and actual command-and-control.
[¶65.] The computer revolution is no longer distinct from weapons and weapons system development. Computers are embedded elements of a whole new class of weapons, and of command and information systems.48 Humans are still formally in charge. Yet there remains the fundamental and extrinsic problem of just how much command-and-control they can exert in the new combat environment. The rapid advance in technology continues to escalate the problem of weapons and system control at least as fast as it has increased the capability of the central command structure. The electronic battlefield is as short in decision time as it is high in information flows.49 In an era of supersonic aircraft armed with high-speed missiles, quick-reacting radar-directed gun and missile batteries, and tank battles that may be won or lost on the first shot, there is simply not the time for centralized command systems to exercise real-time control over battlefield events.50
[¶66.]
[¶67.] Many analysts argue that the illusion of inevitability was just that. Although it has been widely held that the tight coupling of the mobilization systems effectively co-opted the political process once mobilization had been ordered, the belief by those in power that it was irreversible seems to have been a cognitive trap.52 The governments of France, Russia, and Germany could have averted war by halting mobilization, even at the last minute, just as the USS Vincennes (and the Israeli Air Defense Command) could have decided to wait instead of firing to make sure that their prospective target was really hostile. But in both cases, the pressure to commit rapidly made the costs seem far too high.
[¶68.] In the Napoleonic Wars, committing to a process that would inevitably lead to battle was something that might be done days, or weeks, before the first shot was fired. In 1914, the commitment time to start the war was measured in days: during the war, commitment in combat was often measured in hours. The advancing soldiers were fully aware that the preprogrammed artillery barrage at the Somme had moved too far in front of them to be effective in keeping the Germans in their trenches, but they were committed; there was no way to cancel their orders, or their battle. On the electronic battlefield, the time from detection to commitment may soon be measured in fractions of seconds.
[¶69.] The introduction of computerized systems for force integration and communication, for weapons firing and control, or for command-and-control, makes rapid and effective intervention more possible. But the introduction of these systems also shortens the reaction time, possibly creating a framework where the human beings who are supposed to retain the ultimate discretion and judgment are effectively trapped in a logical decision loop in which they are no more likely to change the sequence of events than were the political leaders in August 1914.
[¶70.] It is in this context that the example of Iran Air Flight 655 or the shooting down of the Libyan airliner are disquieting illustrations of the potential vulnerabilities of future military C3 I systems. In both cases, the pressure to commit within a short time did not allow the commanders to escape being captured by the representations created by their own electronic capabilities. The resulting combination of tight coupling and cognitive error is disturbingly reminiscent of the "logic trap" that determined the course of the First World War, or that which led to the U.S. debacle in Vietnam.53
[¶71.] In the new vision of the battlespace, commanders from the company level up to the commander in chief, linked by nearly instantaneous communications, can be kept informed of every battle almost on a moment-to-moment basis, and supplied continuously with a steady stream of detailed and up-to-date information on enemy dispositions, movements, and perhaps even intentions. The Force XXI document spells it out clearly: "Electronic connectivity between and among all echelons in the Army will result in such speed and precision in communications that the entire organization's situational awareness and agility will far exceed that of today's forces."54
[¶72.] Recognizing that the military of the next century is more likely to be engaged in flexible missions of limited scope than large, central wars, the response has been to increase not only effectiveness, but "efficiency." Despite all the claims to have studied, and learned from, Auftragstaktik, independence of action is rejected as too costly and too inefficient.
[¶73.] Electronics are no longer to be extrinsic to the realities of combat; information and communication flows will now be tightly integrated to allow planning in hours, rather than days, almost in "real time." Firepower will be concentrated, intense, and highly technical, and, in some arenas (tanks, airpower, surface fights at sea), the outcome of individual combat will be decided almost instantaneously by the response and accuracy of the electronics. Instead of uncertainty about disposition and movement, there will be AWACS aircraft, satellites, and ground positioning systems. Instead of the painstaking process of building cognitive maps of the state of battle through the interpretation of remotely transmitted messages and the observations of runners and other messengers, an electronically informed and direct map will be constructed and maintained in headquarters. No expense will be spared to ensure that the troops, increasingly scarce, and increasingly valuable, are not exposed to unnecessary risk.
[¶74.] Just as more and more business organizations are moving to a tightly coupled, highly interdependent organization whose resources are controlled and allocated horizontally across the network by a web of computerized communications and coordinated by computerized command-and-control systems, so, apparently, is the U.S. Army. As was discussed in chapter 7, even those long-term consequences that can be anticipated for such safety critical systems as air traffic control or nuclear power operation are enough to have slowed down the rate of implementation. In those cases, operators had sufficient prestige and influence to hold the designers off. But in the U.S. military, the promoters of technical change are by now almost completely in charge, and the "operators," the grunts who do the actual fighting, are likely to have almost no voice at all. The resulting surprises could be very unpleasant indeed.
[¶76.] The new image of the military of the twenty-first century is a totally integrated, electronically linked, fully computerized fighting force, trained for and fighting on an electronic battlefield. In the air and at sea, training for combat with computer simulators and games is already being taken as the equivalent of actual combat. Even the Army, historically the most traditional and conservative of the armed forces, is moving as fast in the direction of an electronic battlefield as budgets and system designs will allow toward "full integration of information-age technology [which] . . . will result in making operating force decisions from the individual soldier to the highest level of the Institutional Army."55
[¶77.] Such tight control goes against the lesson that confusion and disorder, Clausewitz's "fog of war," will remain the natural state of combat, however advanced, sophisticated, and precise the new systems might appear to be when tested in peacetime. Loosely coordinated small-group autonomy is inefficient, it calls for considerable logistic and maintenance independence and the ability of front commanders to marshall their own air support and artillery. Abandoning it for a more integrated doctrine that could prove tragically fragile in the face of an enemy capable of interfering with the elaborate command networks runs the great risk of trading off overall effectiveness for the sake of technical efficiency.
[¶78.] When computers were first introduced into the military, they were large and centralized mainframes, primarily for the command-and-control of nuclear forces. Having acquired computer literacy early and convincingly, the military set off on the active pursuit of ever smaller and more capable systems. These were intended at first for improving the capabilities of nuclear forces, including delivery systems. As powerful and portable computers became available, they were also introduced rapidly into those elements of other forces, particularly air forces, where technical advantage had been identified as a leading factor in combat. As van Creveld has pointed out, the simpler the fighting environment, the greater the military benefit of technical superiority.56 To which he might have added, the greater the cost and the scarcer the weapons system, the more cost-effective is the investment in electronic capabilities.
[¶79.] But the rapid progress in computer power and miniaturization in the 1980s and 1990s made it possible to think of introducing computers and computerized systems into every element of combat, including the complex and often incoherent environment of ground battles. As recently as a decade ago, the computer was with few exceptions still an innovation in conventional ground warfare, an adjunct and augmentation to traditional ways of fighting. As with other aspects of computing in other, more civil settings, it was the embedding of the computer into the force structure, its disappearance as a separable and unusual object, that marked its growing importance. Albeit to varying degrees, and on different timetables, every component of U.S. military forces is now being designed and built around computerized weapons, systems, and C3 I. The historical military that carried on almost unchanged structurally through the early years of the computer is now being almost totally deconstructed. What remains unclear is what will result from the still-ongoing reconstruction and redefinition of the meaning and purpose of U.S. military power in the age of computerized, smart machines.
[¶80.] The intervention of the military reformers during the 1980s can now be seen to have committed the United States not only to the doctrines and strategies of maneuver warfare, but also to a radical transformation of representation. The doctrines of FM 100-5 and the tactics of AirLand Battle have evolved into Force XXI and similar plans for the next century that represent a commitment to the extensive use of electronics and other high-technology systems to keep casualties to a minimum as well as to new weapons and small units.
[¶81.] During the height of the defense reform debate, the reformers were sometimes referred to by their conservative colleagues as the Jedi Knights.57 Many of the reformers were delighted. The image is not only that of autonomy, independence, and rebellion against bureaucratized imperial structures and large, clumsy, centralized militaries, but also of cleverness, of the creative use of flexible technical innovation, of the triumph of intelligent and forward-looking youth. But it should be remembered that every force has its dark side: Darth Vader was also a Jedi.
NOTES:
The version of the famous Moltke quote used as an epigraph to this chapter is taken from van Creveld, Command in War, 146.
1 O'Connell, Of Arms and Men; Weigley, American Way of War; Dupuy, Ge-nius for War; John Keegan, Face of Battle.
2 van Creveld, Command in War; March and Weissinger-Baylon, Ambiguity and Command.
3 van Creveld, Command in War, 6.
4 One measure of complexity used in formal organization theory can be characterized broadly as the product N
5 This also extends to the various combinations of C and I that are bandied about at various times for various reasons, ranging from the simple C
6 See, for example, the many usages set out in Beniger, Control Revolution.
7 Landau and Stout, Jr., "To Manage Is Not to Control."
8 See, for example, Orr, "Combat Operations," 58ff.
9 Demchak, "Fully Networked Battlespace"; Morton, "The Softwar Revolution."
10 Although that is not always the case. Because of the time it took to communicate over long distances, the historic Battle of New Orleans was fought after the peace treaty concluding the War of 1812 had already been signed.
11 This is the historical origin of the claim by naval captains for unusual powers of independence and command, including the right to execute offenders and perform marriages at sea.
12 Strachan, European Armies, 37ff.
13 Ibid., 41ff. The lowly potato was perhaps the first portable field ration. Since it could be carried along with the ordinary foot soldier, was durable, and did not spoil easily, it played a major role in the transformation.
14 van Creveld, Fighting Power; Dupuy, Genius for War.
15 Of course, in war, nothing is certain, or generalizable. There were also times and places where lack of coordination was fatal, or at least disastrous. Napoleonic infantry and artillery squares were effective, but more rigid than most. Nevertheless, the generalization still holds. No better description could be found than Tolstoy's description of Borodino, or van Creveld's masterly analysis of Königgrätz.
16 For a more detailed exposition, see Donnelly, "Friction and Warfare."
17 Weigley, American Way of War, 143ff.
18 Strachan, European Armies; Dupuy, Genius for War. The latter argues that the Prussian success may have been due more to the breech loading needle gun and the more intelligent use of the railroads for massing forces.
19 van Creveld, Command in War, 146.
20 Prefiguring U.S. experience a century later, Moltke's main problem was that his superiors in Berlin had no such compunctions, and kept up a steady stream of queries, comments, criticisms, and attempts at intervention. Hence the epigraph at the head of this chapter.
21 Strachan, European Armies, 141.
22 van Creveld, Command in War, 166.
23 Keegan, Face of Battle, 267.
24 Strachan, European Armies, 140ff.; van Creveld, Command in War, 168ff.
25 van Creveld, Command in War, 183.
26 van Creveld, Fighting Power, 167.
27 The term comes from Jones, Wizard War. Although the book reveals only the details of allied cryptography efforts, and not the equally important work done in the areas of radar, systems and operations research, communications, and other electronics (such as proximity fusing), the term has come to be applied to the secret allied scientific effort generally.
28 Rhodes,
29 The definitive postwar statement of this new approach was that of Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men.
30 Thompson,
31 van Creveld, Command in War, 232ff. Gibson's Perfect War may be the single best book on how American managerial and technocratic assumptions led to a systemic defeat.
32 Chapman, "High-Technology Weapons," 78ff.
33 As quoted by Chapman, "High-Technology Weapons," 61.
34 Bellin and Chapman, Computers in Battle, 78ff.
35 Jacky, "Strategic Computing Program."
36 Ibid., 181-182.
37 Dupuy, Genius for War.
38 For example: "Horizontal technology integration across today's weapons systems is a cost-effective means to achieve the five Force XXI objectives and dominate the 21st Century battlefield" (Department of the Army, Force XXI, 14).
39 For an excellent discussion of the implications of tight coupling, see Perrow, Normal Accidents.
40 Chapman, "High-Technology Weapons," 91-92.
41 Nelan, "Revolution at Defense"; Newsweek, "America at War"; San Francisco Chronicle, "Air Dominance"; Morton, "Softwar."
42 Admiral William Owens, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as cited by Morton, "Softwar Revolution," S8. Also see Department of the Army, Force XXI.
43 The quotes from General Sullivan are taken from Demchak, "Information Age Army."
44 Demchak, "Information Age Army."
45 Ibid.
46 Coakley, Command and Control.
47 Ibid.; Coakley, ed., C
48 Deitchman, Advance of Technology; Bellin and Chapman, Computers in Battle; Din, ed., Arms and Artificial Intelligence.
49 Chapman, "High-Technology Weapons," 70.
50 See, for example, Lanir, Fischoff, and Johnson, "Military Risk-Taking."
51 Although it did not necessarily create it. The recent debate over the comparative roles of technology, offensive doctrine, and politics has been quite animated. See, for examples, Shimshoni, "Technology, Military Advantage, and World War I"; Posen, Military Doctrine; Sagan, "1914 Revisited"; Snyder, "Civil-Military Relations"; Snyder, Ideology of the Offensive; Trachtenberg, "Meaning of Mobilization"; Van Evera, "Cult of the Offensive."
52 A notable exception is Trachtenberg, "Meaning of Mobilization," who argues that the preemption of politics by the technology of mobilization does not stand up to close scrutiny. This article provoked an animated exchange of letters in International Security (vol. 15, no. 1) that continued and expanded the arguments without ever resolving them.
53 I thank Zvi Lanir for this provocative and useful analogy.
54 Department of the Army, Force XXI, 6.
55 Ibid., 29. Also see Morton, "Softwar Revolution."
56 van Creveld, Technology and War, 228.
57 Mazarr and others, Desert Storm, 153.
Conclusion