How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not E
WIRED MAGAZINE: WIRED ISSUE 15.12
How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic
By Noah Shachtman
11.27.07 | 6:00 PM
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Network-centric wars would be more moral, too. Cebrowski later argued that network-enabled armies kill more of the right people quicker. With fewer civilian casualties, warfare would be more ethical. And as a result, the US could use military might to create free societies without being accused of imperialist arrogance.
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And yet, here we are. The American military is still mired in Iraq. It's still stuck in Afghanistan, battling a resurgent Taliban. Rumsfeld has been forced out of the Pentagon. Dan Halutz, the Israeli Defense Forces chief of general staff and net-centric advocate who led the largely unsuccessful war in Lebanon in 2006, has been fired, too. In the past six years, the world's most technologically sophisticated militaries have gone up against three seemingly primitive foes — and haven't won once.
How could this be? The network-centric approach had worked pretty much as advertised. Even the theory's many critics admit net-centric combat helped make an already imposing American military even more effective at locating and killing its foes. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar were broken almost instantly. But network-centric warfare, with its emphasis on fewer, faster-moving troops, turned out to be just about the last thing the US military needed when it came time to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. A small, wired force leaves generals with too few nodes on the military network to secure the peace. There aren't enough troops to go out and find informants, build barricades, rebuild a sewage treatment plant, and patrol a marketplace.
For the first three years of the Iraq insurgency, American troops largely retreated to their fortified bases, pushed out woefully undertrained local units to do the fighting, and watched the results on feeds from spy drones flying overhead. Retired major general Robert Scales summed up the problem to Congress by way of a complaint from one division commander: "If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can't connect with the local population." How could he? For far too many units, the war had been turned into a telecommute. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon were the first conflicts planned, launched, and executed with networked technologies and a networked ideology. They were supposed to be the wars of the future. And the future lost.
- of Hippies and Megalomaniacs
HTTs with 26 different units, now that is truly impressive, if not downright remarkable. This taxpayer likes to see his greenbacks spent in this manner. I would hope there would be a former hippy or two in the HTTs, it would somehow be fitting in lieu of the shock and awe mentality of Rummy's war venue that kicked the whole thing off. In retrospect, he reminds me of Cpt. Fetterman so many years ago who made the claim he could with 80 men ride through the whole Lakota nation. Rummy always worked standing up, I'm drifting here, and I've never fully trusted any man who could only think on his feet. High techery seemed to compliment his high energy, as it does many of us, and it fed his megalomania.
Another view on Wired article
Myspace, Social Networking
Quote:
"to transmit data, full-motion video, still photos, images, information. So you can more effectively determine who the enemy is, find them and kill or capture, and have a sense of what's going on in the area as you do it — where the friendlies are, and which platform you want to bring to bear."
Of course, he adds, he doesn't believe the Rumsfeld-era idea that you can get away with fewer, better-networked troops. Petraeus is the man behind the "surge," after all. Anyone who thinks you don't need massing of troops is living in an "academic world," he says. And Petraeus believes "the most important network is still the one that is between the ears of commanders and staff officers."
Yet he's a believer, just like a whole lot of other Army generals. He supports the $230 billion plan to wire the Army, a gargantuan commitment to network-centric war. "We realized very quickly you could do incredible stuff with this," he says. "It was revolutionary. It was."
I press my hands to my forehead. What about all the cultural understanding, I ask him. What about nation-building? What about your counterinsurgency manual?
It's in front of their faces the whole time and they no comprende. Network centric social warfare happens every day. We do it here and in any spaces where we share links, pictures, videos, write ideas or otherwise convey any personal information or philosophy.
We use similar electronic systems to identify, evaluate and expand connections. The idea of "network centric" is not simply about our ability to connect weapons platforms. It's about connecting our people. evaluating their connections through knowledge of similar social networks. Evaluating the enemy's connections through similar concepts and finally, as we know within our own social networks, we are even linked to "the enemy" through one of those connections. If you follow it back, use the right tools, you can develop an electronic system that enhances our abilities within the human landscape.
That Sgt was very smart. Many social networkers use "trojan" or "parody" sites in order to entice opposition to view their opinions and ideas. And, hackers, of course, use mirror sites to capture unsuspecting customers of the real organization, obtain their information and steal their identities.
This is not new to the internet, nor in war fare.
It is simply that people cannot perceive the use of such technologies and network concepts to be adapted to warfare.
by the way, a part of that "network centric" is the very simplest idea of showing where each "good guy" is on the map, where they think the bad guy is, and the terrain in between.
This is like the idea that we can't build the ability to successfully prosecute counter-insurgencies and conventional wars with the same organization. Why is technology, so highly integrated into our daily lives and important to our own social connectivity, so hard to conceive of integrated technology and social networking on the battle field?
Besides, Petraeus is only singing the half of it. Our soldiers of the future will take their own experiences with social networking: "network centric" gaming, chat and information sharing to a new level within the military. Those first ideas about how this network will be utilized will be looked at in the same manner that an inventor once imagined a future where 1 million adding machines were linked together. He could only imagine a future based on his own experiences.
