9.2 OVERESTIMATING OURSELVES
First in this category, there is the deniable assumption that our human character does not play a significant role in the conduct of war. Ignoring the fact that we are, after all, only human, can lead to considerable misunderstanding in the current debate about the military utility of information technology. As we have shown in Chapter 4, Network Centrism rests on the proposition that networking of collaborative entities in a battlespace leads to common situational awareness, which in turn leads to self-synchronization in action, and thus to a high rate of change in the tactical situation. However, the degree to which any of these events would actually occur depends upon the degree to which they are consistent with the nature of the entities connected by the network. Thus, we have seen in the previous chapter that the degree of cohesion attainable in a community of collaborating humans is strongly affected by the balance between the persuasive power of the community and the degree of individuality demonstrated by its members.
Humans being what they are, one should not expect them to easily discard their predispositions in favor of the community view. Consequently, increasing the power to persuade which resides in the embedding community by increasing the size of that community would not likely lead to the common situational awareness Network Centrism promises. Before acquiring the information technologies needed to network the force, one must therefore develop a command and control system able to efficiently manage the collaboration process, not the other way around as suggested by the doctrine of Network Centric Warfare.
In a similar fashion, increasing the size of the network will not necessarily lead to individuals that could react in a synchronized fashion to a common situational awareness, even if one emerged from the collaboration. As we have shown in the previous chapter, the extent of self-synchronization is directly related to the proficiency with which the members of the community are able to execute their part of the total task and, that, in turn, depends upon two critical factors: the size of the community and the proficiency that its members had before joining the community. For communities of conventional size, high degree of synchronization would require a very high degree of pre-existing proficiency. Consequently, information technology should not be acquired unless the recruiting and training system were able to provide the operational community with individuals of very high proficiency.
This leads us to the second deniable assumption in this category: that humans are infinitely perfectible. As we have seen in the previous chapter, human proficiency is the result of the interplay between learning and forgetting. Learning involves both training as well as an individual’s response to that training; the former is measured by the amount of time spend in training, the latter by the strength of the learning process that characterizes the individual. However, the amount of time the members of an operational community spend on realistic training is relatively small. Therefore, the level of proficiency obtained through training is bound to be quite limited no matter how strong the learning ability. Common situational awareness will not lead to synchronized action, despite Network Centrism’s insistence to the contrary, because humans are not sufficiently perfectible. Before deciding to acquire the information technology designed to increase synchronization, we must therefore acquire as much automation as it is consistent with the degree of flexibility the creator of the machine can put into its software, and demonstrate that we can develop teaching techniques which would significantly increase the strength of the learning process.