Curbing Innovation / 1

1 INTRODUCTION

There is a theory of warfare that is spreading unchallenged throughout the military establishments of the western powers like a rumor that relentlessly passes back and forth within the body of a crowd. Its name is Network Centric Warfare and its main thesis is that recently developed information technology compellingly points the way towards a revolution in military affairs.

According to this theory, widespread use of information technology would inevitably lead to what the proponents call “information superiority”, a state of affairs in which our side would benefit from a far more detailed picture of the enemy force than the enemy would be able to have of ours. From this position of superiority, our side would naturally come to understand the circumstances surrounding the battle at hand long before the enemy could do the same, and, aided by this “cognitive” superiority, our side should then be able to devise tactical operations that unfolded at a significantly faster rate than the enemy reaction speed. This speed differential would succeed in confusing the enemy and paralyzing his will to resist. Under these circumstances, our side should easily be able to seize the initiative, dictate the course of military operations to the enemy, and thus end up destroying his forces in detail at minimum cost to us.

This ability to wage war without having to worry anymore about that uncertainty in battle which our forefathers have known so well, might indeed, if true, constitute a revolution in military affairs. But, while all the consequences that Network Centric theory attributes to the use of information technology could occur in actual combat some of the time, it is far from proven that even some of them could occur all of the time. Therefore, any attempt at irreversibly restructuring the national war machine around information technology before the natural limits of the theory of Network Centric Warfare have been explicitly ascertained would, at best, be inadvisable.

To understand these limits, however, a conversation must first take place concerning the fundamental relationship between technology and war. Unfortunately, the theory of Network Centric Warfare tends to assert, rather than argue, the veracity of its revolutionary vision and the proponents, with the force which so often characterizes unquestionable convictions, have a tendency to brush aside quickly without discussion any points that may be raised in opposition to her claims. Under the circumstances, there has been no serious and concerted conversation to date about the advantages and disadvantages of the Network Centric position, no determined attempt at integrating the undeniable qualities of information technology within the boundaries of a more conventional, non-revolutionary form of warfare, and, consequently, no understanding of the factors that limit the applicability of the Network Centric theory to actual war has yet emerged.

The main task of this book is to find the natural limits of the Network Centric vision. Since one can not render thoughtful judgment upon the wisdom of pursuing the road toward the revolution in military affairs that the proponents of Network Centric Warfare promise for tomorrow without understanding first how and why the western powers managed to arrive to where they are today, this book starts by placing the Network Centric position within its appropriate historical and military context.

In the first chapter of the book, we therefore recount the main points in the history of how military establishments have come to decide which technology they needed to acquire. In it, we show that the current mechanism for generating relevant technologies has naturally evolved from, what the American historian William H. McNeill calls “command technology” [1], an attitude towards military technology that was originally developed in France during the 18th century and perfected in England during the early 19th century. McNeill uses the term command technology to denote a special relationship between defense officials and inventors, a relationship in which the officials specify the desirable performance characteristics of a new weapon system and then challenge the inventors to come up with appropriate technical designs. Before the advent of command technology, invention had almost always been the work of individuals who had to try subsequently to sell their invention to skeptical officials.

Early successes in developing needed military technology according to this model, have encouraged officials to hurry innovation along by delineating the military requirements in advance and paying at least some of the development costs up front. Eventually command technology became so prolific that some mechanism for controlling its creative energies had to be found. By the end of World War II, the United States had developed the art of managing large industrial enterprises to such a level, that creating a means of controlling technological innovation became a practical proposition. The model for accomplishing that goal came from the Prussian General Staff, an institution created during the 19th century to conduct detailed planning of specific campaigns. The second chapter describes how the planning scenario introduced by this General Staff, combined with the discipline of systems analysis institutionalized by the American Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the early 1960’s, have succeeded in creating a control mechanism for the institution of command technology. The book records the signal successes this controlling mechanism has achieved during the Cold War and describes the mature form it had reached in America by the end of that war.

Unfortunately, as described in Chapter 4 of this book, the end of the Cold War initiated the slow disintegration of this control mechanism. As a consequence of this disintegrating process, the military establishment began to loose control of command technology and, as argued in Chapter 5, command technology eventually went astray and, in the process, created the theory of Network Centric Warfare. Chapter 6 describes the destructive influences this uncontrolled journey is having upon the way the military establishment views war. Thus, the chapter first argues that the emerging goal of technological innovation for the sake of innovation is beginning to replace the conventional goal of the military establishment, that of securing the nation’s interests against the likely enemies. Next, the chapter documents how, in order to justify the dictates of uncontrolled technology, wishful thinking replaces mature planning and execution of bureaucratic tasks replaces the dynamics of war. Finally, it is argued that machines, the natural products of technology, are beginning to replace humans in the performance of many functions, and that command and control, perhaps the only military activity that should remain quintessentially human, is nevertheless quickly becoming a network of computers.

Chapter 7 recommends a specific way of reversing this trend. After pointing out that the security challenges facing us today should not be confronted through continued development of what, by all standards, is already a formidable military capability, but rather through consolidation of that capability against enemy exploitation of the singular vulnerabilities that are in it, this chapter goes on to suggest that command technology should be re-disciplined by slaving her creative energies to the requirement of reducing, or at least not increasing, the set of those singular vulnerabilities. Systems analysis is used in Chapter 8 to explore the limitations imposed upon Network Centric Warfare by the requirement that acquisition of information technology should not increase the set of singular vulnerabilities which already beset our military posture.

At the end, information technology is not altogether ruled out; it is merely returned to its natural limits through a process described in Chapter 9. We learn that information technology will not produce any of the revolutionary advantages Network Centrists promise because war is a bloody fight against ingenious and resourceful enemies, a fight conducted by military forces whose behavior is all too human. We further learn that information technology will return military value only if its acquisition is coupled with the acquisition of complementary technologies and with the development of complementary strategies and tactics, all of which should be designed to control the extent to which the reality of war might invalidate the potential advantages of that technology through the introduction of additional vulnerabilities.

Under the circumstances, implementing the Network Centric vision is likely to cost too much, not only because its acquisition requires purchase of costly insurance technologies, but also because what is thus being purchased is only focused on making sure that Network Centrism does not increase the set of vulnerabilities currently present in our military posture. By thus not making any attempt to identify and eliminate existing vulnerabilities, Network Centrism falls outside the guiding principle that we have constructed to control command technology. The acquisition establishment should therefore re-direct its attention from implementing the Network Centric vision to addressing the role of information technology, in competition with all other relevant technologies, in reducing the singular vulnerabilities in our current posture.

On our way towards thus deciding the extent to which resting modern warfare upon information technology is a wise thing to do, we were called upon to describe the fundamental mechanism which should underlie the acquisition of all military technology. Specifically, we learned that, unlike commercial technology, military technology must be developed under the controlling guidance of our national security interests, and that systems analysis, with its attendant trade-off technique, must be used to implement that guidance. To render our story intelligible to those that might not be familiar with systems analysis, we stop at appropriate points along the main journey towards understanding Network Centric Warfare to remind the reader about the key elements of that mechanism and to argue in favor of their ultimate utility. We hope, therefore, that readers of this book who are familiar with systems analysis will bear with understanding patience our occasional insistence upon the advantages of systems analysis in controlling command technology.