6.4 COMMAND AND CONTROL BECOMES A NETWORK OF COMPUTERS
This prevailing misunderstanding of how humans interact with the world around them and with each other, when coupled together with the growing disregard for the actions of the enemy that characterizes modern military thinking, is getting dangerously close to eviscerating the art of command and control, perhaps the one truly human, enemy-focused, dimension of warfare. As Vice Admiral Robert Willard, Commander Seventh Fleet, has recently said, it is becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between the first two Cs and the next two Cs in the acronym C4 that we use to designate Command, Control, Communications, and Computers [2]:
We in the U.S. military made a mistake when we combined command and control with communications and computers to yield the C4 acronym. Following that initiative, the acquisition and training on command and control tools—computers, radios, and software—became confused with the requirement for continuous training in the operational art of, and methods for, effective control of forces. Frequently these days, commanders tinker with new technologies such as chat rooms, three-dimensional graphics, and web sites and call that command and control. Command and control is a lost art that has been swept into cyberspace by a whirlwind of technologies, made less significant by weak doctrine and misunderstood terms, and put off by future visions of every warfighter possessing relevant information.
If the first two Cs will serve us well in the next war, that will happen, as it did in Afghanistan, despite Network Centrism, not because of it. The premise suggested by Network Centrism that each cell in the military organism is as knowledgeable as the next, is inimical to the art of Command and Control which rests on the proposition that the basis for a commander exercising control, should be his better insight into what is required to win the day than what is evidenced by the subordinate commander’s actions. Since wishful thinking concerning how much each living cell in the military organism understands about winning the day is no replacement for reality, one ignores this difference at one’s peril.
The root of the problem lies in the Utopian misrepresentation of human behavior espoused by Network Centrism. Machines can work more efficiently than man, but, slaved as they are to the instruction given them by their creator, they can not adapt to unforeseen circumstances. On the other hand, humans, quintessentially the adaptable animals, cannot be nearly as efficient as machines. Integrate the two, and you have serious cause for worry. Indeed, before long, the inefficient humans will inevitably get out of synchronization with the highly efficient machines and, given the complete networking of the war machine, any such mismatch, no matter how slight, will propagate nonlinearly throughout the system like wildfire. Listen to this story from Millennium Challenge 2002 [3]:
Establishing and maintaining the battle-rhythm is a process for sequentially moving needed information from one planning or decision-making group to another, with each participating board, center, or cell, making an appropriate contribution. When using the Common Information Environment tool, much of the sequential activity of the boards, centers, and cells became concurrent. This put a significant amount of pressure on the execution of the battle-rhythm. Starting and ending times for boards, centers, and cells, were often shifted to allow for the completion of collaborative work. Each shift rippled through a tightly organized battle-rhythm with the result that many participants found that they had to be in more than one event simultaneously.
Networking the Command and Control function would thus render our Command and Control architecture every bit as unstable under unforeseen disturbances as any highly integrated complex electronic system usually is.
While one could argue that these are no more than birth pains in the process of creating a fully networked force, just arguing so is not enough; before going too far down this path, one has a responsibility to first convince oneself and others that the irreversible steps one takes are conducive to the fulfillment of the defining purpose of any war machine, that of defending the nation against any enemy that would irritate her security interests.