How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not E

[kehenry1]

"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.