Curbing Innovation / 6 / 6.3

6.3 BUREAUCRACY TAKES OVER THE DYNAMICS OF WAR

Since the enemy is thus no longer actively engaged in thwarting our plans, our own engagement becomes a mere list of tasks that we must undertake in order to achieve victory. This bureaucratization of war is replacing the well documented description of war as a dynamic process in which each side aims at submitting the opponent to his own will with the misleading image of war as business. Thus, gaining situational awareness about the enemy becomes mere intelligence collection, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); resilience becomes mere logistics; engagement with the enemy becomes long-range strike of passive targets; and force cohesion becomes mere networking. Each of the replacing entities is manifestly set-piece activities whose execution is governed by procedure and are therefore not influenced at all by enemy behavior.

Going through the motions of collecting information about the surrounding circumstances, as one does when one executes the ISR task, hardly amounts to gaining situational awareness about what actually unfolds on the battlefield. To bridge the gap between mere information and situational awareness, one needs to ponder the veracity of that information, to understand its military significance, and then to weigh the alternative actions one might want to undertake in light of what one thinks the actual enemy, bent on deception, is likely to do. Believing that information supremacy automatically translates into situational awareness, Network Centrism fails to perceive the difference between fighting a war and managing an institution. This failure of understanding leaves our side wide open to enemy deception.

The static character that bureaucratization has thus imparted to war, also tends to brush over the difference between resilience and logistics. Obviously, to be resilient, a force must have the physical and moral strength not only to fight at any time it might be called upon do so, but also to survive such a fight with sufficient residue as to be able to fight again another day. Therefore, conducting the resupply operations normally associated with mere logistics will not be sufficient to make our military forces resilient; to attain that goal, we would also have to protect our resupply line and conduct operations intended to overcome enemy attempts at demoralizing and physically exhausting our forces. The difference, of course, is that logistics is a bureaucratic activity akin to what FedEx does, while resilience is a quality of a war machine engaged in a fully dynamic war with the enemy.

But perhaps the most blatant disregard for the dynamics of war is manifested in the increasing tendency to mistake long-range strike operations for the set of all military engagements. Encouraged by the exquisite accuracy of our modern weapons and the availability of information about the location of fixed targets, Network Centrists seem to think that engagement with the enemy is fully consumed in the bureaucratic undertaking of detecting, localizing, and then destroying a static target from very far away. This ignores the fact that an enemy worthy of its name could easily transform any contemplated strike operation into a dynamic engagement by employing deception, evasion, and perhaps a strike capability of its own.

Finally, Network Centrism has reduced force cohesion to mere networking. Cohesion in a military force implies that all members are connected in a logical and orderly manner and that this connected community of parts is able to operate as a single, synchronized individual. Since all communities stand as a balanced compromise between the individuality of their members, on the one hand, and the overarching pressure to attain some common understanding, on the other, our military machine must not only be connected for efficient information flow between its component parts, but must also be effectively commanded and controlled to ensure that a common understanding is achieved and properly implemented, be ably led by commanders that can reduce the friction generated by the individuality of the parts, and be fully and often exercised as a whole. Networking, on the other hand, implies nothing more than the physical connection between the parts of a military force. In fact, according to the Network Centric position, simply connecting a force into a network and allowing the component parts to collaborate with each other, would automatically bring with it cohesion in action, that famous self-synchronization effect of which proponents of Network centrism are constantly talking about. Therefore, Network Centrism, by ignoring the dynamic tension that obtains between the members of a military force, completely misses the fact that, by using misinformation, an enemy has considerable ability to increase those natural tensions.

To miss this difference between networking and cohesion is to misunderstand the meaning of the word information. According to the Webster dictionary, the word information originates in a combination of three Latin words: in + forma + ation. The first Latin word means to conform or to submit; the second, stands for the form or the essence of something; while the third word refers to something that is connected with an action or a process. Therefore, information stands for something connected with the process by which the apprehending mind is made to conform with the essence of an object of knowledge. But to apprehend something is itself a composition of two Latin words: ad + prehendere. The first means near, the second to grasp or to seize. Therefore, to apprehend an object of knowledge means to grasp and bring it near to oneself in the act of becoming familiar with it, and the corresponding information contains the essence which has thus been apprehended.

However, this process of getting familiar with an object of knowledge is a singularly personal action involving the way in which the apprehending individual approaches the object of knowledge and makes it familiar to himself. The information which results from this process is consequently equally personal. Information is not a fully objective entity that can be used by any individual who receives it to enlarge automatically his preexisting understanding, as one would do to complete a building with so many bricks of uniform shape and size; received information carries with it the unique imprint of the individual that created and transmitted it to us, and would therefore be useful to us if, and only if, the message it carried was consistent with our preexisting understanding.

The tension that obtains between these two points of view, that of the sending entity reflecting the sender’s personal understanding of the situation, and that of the receiving entity reflecting the receiver’s personal understanding of the situation, is akin to the tension between the two sides of a debate and it does not therefore automatically lend itself to collaborative resolution. At the end of the day, a free conversation between the members of the community, even if undertaken in a fully collaborative atmosphere, is not likely to reach any common understanding of the prevailing situation. As von Clausewitz once famously said, to reach an agreement about what is going on, the authority of a commander is needed.