9.1 UNDERESTIMATING OUR ENEMY
First, there is the deniable assumption that the enemy does not have the ingenuity to deceive us. As we have seen in the previous chapter, however, just how operational effectiveness increases when the information content available to us is increased, depends upon the enemy’s ability to hide his plan of action from us. If the enemy were able to hide successfully from us his intended movement within the battlespace, increasing our ability to follow the motion of any target would profit us little because the enemy would have the ability to keep that from our information gathering system. Before proceeding to acquire some piece of information technology, one must therefore explicitly consider the extent to which its military benefits could be affected by any reasonable enemy deception plan.
To make their claim for the revolutionary advantages of information technology valid, Network Centrists will therefore have to assume a perfectly predictable enemy. Conversely, allowing for a deceptive enemy will force Network Centrists to lower their exaggerated expectation about the military value of information technology. Consequently, information technology must always be acquired together with the means of curtailing the enemy’s ability to deceive, or not be acquired at all. Recalling our discussion of the strike operation in Afghanistan, for instance, one would have to develop and acquire technologies able to force the enemy out of hiding, say an explosive device that could be targeted at people hiding in a cave, or develop some tactic that would limit the advantages of hiding in them, before acquiring information technology aimed at improving our targeting capability.
Second, there is the deniable assumption that the enemy does not have the agility to force us into a dynamic encounter. It stands to reason, that the amount of increase in our ability to kill an enemy that would result from an increased knowledge about his location will depend upon what the enemy does when attacked. Debate about the desirability of information technology that would further increase our targeting and tracking capability would therefore have to explicitly take into account the effect of enemy evasion tactics. We have argued in the previous chapter that the enemy’s ability to break trail confers upon him a considerable advantage. That advantage accrues to him because killing enemy targets which are under active tracking is a significantly more productive undertaking than killing targets which have successfully broken trail before the attack took place.
The illustrative modeling from the previous chapter has clearly shown that the Network Centric demand for additional detection capability would pay off if, and only if, the enemy turned out to be a relatively passive target. Consequently, information technology must always be acquired together with the means of curtailing the enemy’s ability to evade, or not be acquired at all. For instance, if the target were an enemy submarine, we would have to acquire the non-acoustic detection system that would be necessary to counter the enemy’s ability to break acoustic track before acquiring information technology aimed at improving our acoustic detection capability.