Cornell Studies in Security Affairs

Jon R. Lindsay

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501749575
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Militaries with state-of-the-art information technology sometimes bog down in confusing conflicts. To understand why, it is important to understand the micro-foundations of military power in the information age, and this is exactly what Jon R. Lindsay's Information Technology and Military Power gives us. As Lindsay shows, digital systems now mediate almost every effort to gather, store, display, analyze, and communicate information in military organizations. He highlights how personnel now struggle with their own information systems as much as with the enemy.

Throughout this foray into networked technology in military operations, we see how information practice—the ways in which practitioners use technology in actual operations—shapes the effectiveness of military performance. The quality of information practice depends on the interaction between strategic problems and organizational solutions. Information Technology and Military Power explores information practice through a series of detailed historical cases and ethnographic studies of military organizations at war. Lindsay explains why the US military, despite all its technological advantages, has struggled for so long in unconventional conflicts against weaker adversaries. This same perspective suggests that the US retains important advantages against advanced competitors like China that are less prepared to cope with the complexity of information systems in wartime. Lindsay argues convincingly that a better understanding of how personnel actually use technology can inform the design of command and control, improve the net assessment of military power, and promote reforms to improve military performance. Warfighting problems and technical solutions keep on changing, but information practice is always stuck in between.

CHAPTER 1

The Technology Theory of Victory

The war of today is being fought with new weapons, but so was the war of yesterday and the day before. Drastic change in weapons has been so persistent in the last hundred years that the presence of that factor might be considered one of the constants of strategy.

Bernard Brodie, A Layman’s Guide to Naval Strategy

The American “electronic battlefield” of the 1970s, the Soviet “reconnaissance-strike complex” of the 1980s, the “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) of the 1990s, Chinese “informatization” in the 2000s, and the American “third offset strategy” in the 2010s all share a family resemblance. They all assume that accurate intelligence sensors connected to precision weapons via common networks and protocols—seeing all, striking all, all together—can improve military performance. Smaller yet smarter forces that can identify and prosecute targets more quickly can thereby defeat larger but slower enemies. The pessimistic converse of this story is that weaker adversaries can use cheap and effective cyber operations to cripple the vital networks of powerful nations. Either way, computational networks will determine success or failure. I call this idea the technology theory of victory.

A theory of victory is an intellectual concept that describes how military organizations can prevail in war.1 It reflects intuitions or folk theories about what war will be like and how militaries will fight it. Concepts may be codified in doctrinal manuals and strategy documents, or they may just be shared beliefs in a military community of practice. Strategic bombing is a theory of victory that holds that air attacks on critical nodes of an enemy’s organization or economy will force it to capitulate. Counterinsurgency is a theory of victory that holds that protecting civil society makes it possible to find and defeat insurgents. Both of these ideas have run into trouble historically because they underestimate the operational difficulties of the task or ignore the political counteractions that undermine it.2 The technology theory of victory has also run afoul of operational and political problems. Decades of effort to substitute information for mass have culminated in cyberwarfare and drone operations, but decisive victory remains elusive.

Hopes and fears about better fighting through information technology are evergreen. New variants of technology theory are already emerging in response to advances in machine learning, embedded computing, and quantum computing. Skeptics have highlighted numerous practical and conceptual shortcomings of technology theory. Scholars have offered more nuanced perspectives on the social factors that shape the adoption and employment of material capabilities. In this chapter I will argue that all of these different strands of debate reflect different perspectives on the same underlying phenomenon: the historically increasing complexity of information practice.

Better Fighting through Information Technology

An early anticipation of technology theory appeared in a 1909 essay on “war in the future” by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, the recently retired chief of the German general staff:

An immediate consequence of the improved rifle is a greater expansion of the battlefront. . . . As big as these battlefields will be, there will be little to see. . . . The commander will be located further in the rear in a house with spacious offices. Wired and radio telegraph, telephone, and signaling equipment are at hand. Fleets of cars and motorbikes ready for the longest rides await orders. There, in a comfortable chair in front of a wide desk, the modern Alexander has a map of the whole battlefield in front of him. He telephones inspiring words and receives the reports from army and corps commanders, tethered balloons, and dirigible airships that observe the movements of enemy forces along the whole front and monitor their positions.3

Schlieffen assumes that the commander who can gather up information from remote sensors in a central representation (or “common operational picture” in modern parlance) will be able to fight more efficiently and more effectively. Efficiency refers to the ratio of inputs to outputs (doing more with less). Effectiveness refers to the likelihood of desired outputs (getting the job done). Militaries historically have prioritized effectiveness over efficiency. Masses of troops and massed fires may not have been cheap, but they were useful for offsetting the uncertainty of war. Larger forces were useful for searching a larger area for enemies that remained hidden, and they could tolerate losses when they made contact with them. When individual soldiers were poor marksmen, similarly, volleys of fire were more likely to hit something. Forces that had more troops and firepower also had important advantages in contests of attrition. Maneuver strategies, by contrast, could improve efficiency by concentrating a smaller number of forces at some decisive point, but they needed reliable intelligence about where that point might be. Mass remained an important insurance policy for times when maneuvers did not go according to plan. Reserve capacity could then compensate for the uncertainty of combat. Mass offset uncertainty. The technology theory of victory, by contrast, aims to use information to substitute for mass. Militaries that are smarter are assumed to be both smaller and more lethal.

Schlieffen, of course, is better remembered as the architect of the eponymous plan for German victory in 1914. That plan, or one inspired by it, resulted not in decisive maneuver, but rather in bloody stalemate and, ultimately, German humiliation. Generals in chateau headquarters had little ability to monitor or control their massive armies once they left the trenches. They developed detailed plans for artillery barrages and infantry advances, but they inevitably failed to push through enemy barbed wire and machine guns. The breakthrough battles of 1918 finally ended the stalemate as doctrinal innovation on both sides empowered small units to maneuver independently. Infantry units used colored flares to communicate their progress and coordinate fire support. Artillery units leveraged aerial photography and silent registration techniques. Schlieffen’s vision of top-down management via information technology was superseded by the bottom-up adaptation of information practice.4

FROM THE ELECTRONIC BATTLEFIELD TO NETWORK-CENTRIC WARFARE

The modern Alexander was reincarnated decades later. General William Westmoreland, while serving as chief of staff of the U.S. Army in 1969, claimed that “we are on the threshold of an entirely new battlefield concept” due to innovation in surveillance and electronics.5 These technologies would enhance both efficiency and effectiveness by substituting information for mass:

Inherent in the function of destroying the enemy is fixing the enemy. In the past, we have devoted sizeable portions of our forces to this requirement. In the future, however, fixing the enemy will become a problem primarily in time rather than space. More specifically, if one knows continually the location of his enemy and has the capability to mass fires instantly, he need not necessarily fix the enemy in one location with forces on the ground. On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located, tracked, and targeted almost instantaneously through use of data links, computer assisted intelligence evaluation and automated fire control. With first round kill probabilities approaching certainty, and with surveillance devices that can continually track the enemy, the need for large forces to fix the opposition physically will be less important. . . . I am confident the American people expect this country to take full advantage of its technology—to welcome and applaud the developments that will replace wherever possible the man with the machine.6

Much as Schlieffen foresaw “the whole battlefield in front of” the commander at his desk, Westmoreland described “an improved communicative system” that “would permit commanders to be continually aware of the entire battlefield panorama down to squad and platoon level.”7 Just as Schlieffen is remembered more for the tragedy of 1914, however, Westmoreland is better known for presiding over the United States’ debacle in Vietnam. Technological prowess and firepower did not make up for political miscalculations about Communist resolve. At the same time, the Vietnam War did witness numerous experiments in remote sensors, data links, computer processing, and precision munitions that anticipated the RMA capabilities to come. As a chastened U.S. military returned its attention to Central Europe, it began fielding an elaborate arsenal of stealth aircraft, battlefield surveillance networks, and smart weapons that would make Westmoreland’s vision of “a more automated battlefield” actually feasible.8

Soviet observers like Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov characterized these developments as nothing less than a “military-technical revolution.” He advanced a Marxist argument that a transformation in the means of destruction must determine a transformation in military operations. The “reconnaissance-strike complex” was the natural product of the electronics age, just as blitzkrieg was the natural product of the industrial age. Soviet ideas entered U.S. strategic discourse through the efforts of Andrew Marshall in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. Marshall, in turn, encouraged U.S. planners to reinforce Soviet fears by doubling down on the reconnaissance-strike complex, thereby forcing Moscow to run an economic race that it could not hope to win. The resulting “offset strategy”—operationalized in the U.S. Army’s “AirLand Battle” and NATO’s “Follow-On Forces Attack” doctrines—was supposed to substitute Western quality for Soviet quantity in Central Europe. These capabilities would ultimately have their wartime debut in the deserts of Iraq. The geographical conditions of Iraq were even more favorable than Europe for combined-arms warfare. Saddam Hussein’s army was also a poor copy of the Red Army, against which the U.S. military had trained and equipped itself to fight. The result of this most favorable alignment of environment and organization was a dramatic rout, but many observers focused on the spectacle of technology instead.9

The 1990s were a perfect storm for military futurism. The sudden end of the Cold War, decisive victory in the Gulf War, the explosion of the internet economy, and an atmosphere of millennial hype encouraged breathless speculation about the transformation of war.10 Visionaries argued that revolutionary technologies required revolutionary concepts and transformational leadership. The Soviet idea of a “military-technical revolution” was rebranded the “revolution in military affairs” to emphasize that radical innovation involved more than just technology. Yet RMA proponents understood this in terms of a technological imperative to alter doctrine and organizations before a strategic competitor like Russia or China made the jump to a higher level of progress. Studies funded by Marshall’s office thus likened the 1990s to the 1930s as a critical period of interwar innovation that would separate winners from losers.11 As Marshall later reflected, “The effort yielded what seemed to be a consensus that we were in a period of major change; in short, that the Russian theorists were right. We also concluded from military history that changes of the scale that we were talking about would involve new concepts of operation, and new organizational structures and processes to execute these concepts.”12

John Boyd’s concept of “the OODA loop” became particularly influential in RMA discourse.13 The perspicacious pilot developed the concept in the late 1970s to describe the “observe, orient, decide, and act” phases of a cybernetic decision cycle. Boyd argued that victory went to the man-machine system that could outthink and outmaneuver an enemy system. His concept tended to conflate tactical and strategic decision making. While the OODA loop was centralized in the cockpit of a single-seat fighter, the ideal of “unity of command” remained elusive in distributed military operations. While speed of decision might be vital in a tactical dogfight, strategic patience could be as useful as tactical agility. Yet the OODA loop resonated strongly for a generation of officers who sought to explain the importance of information in war. In an influential article on “network-centric warfare,” Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski and a coauthor argued that digital networks would enable military forces to cycle the OODA loop so rapidly that “it appears to disappear.” Whereas “situational awareness” deteriorates for industrial-age militaries as they suffer damage in combat, they wrote, information-age militaries would be able to “self-synchronize” the “situational awareness” of the network in order to “lock out” opponents with slower OODA loops. Networked OODA loops would thus transform the episodic nature of war described by Clausewitz into a decisive knockout blow.14

Marshall and Cebrowski’s approach stressed the technological imperative of institutionalizing the RMA. Another navy flag officer, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Owens, was the intellectual force behind a 1996 white paper entitled Joint Vision 2010. This influential document stated, “Information superiority and advances in technology will enable us to achieve the desired effects through the tailored application of joint combat power.”15 Efforts to institutionalize this vision enjoyed bipartisan support. The Clinton administration created a new four-star unified command called Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) to develop new concepts and doctrine for RMA ideas such as “dominant battlefield awareness,” “network-centric warfare,” and “effects-based operations.” In the George W. Bush administration, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pushed an ambitious agenda of “defense transformation” that urged the services to embrace the RMA.16 Rumsfeld also created a new Office of Force Transformation and invited Cebrowski to become its civilian director. At about the same time, Owens published a book entitled Lifting the Fog of War, which included a passage that seemed to channel the ghost of the modern Alexander:

In a future conflict . . . an Army corps commander in his field headquarters will have instant access to a live, three-dimensional image of the entire battlefield displayed on a computer screen, an image generated by a network of sensors including satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles, reconnaissance aircraft, and special operations soldiers on the ground. The commander will know the precise location and activity of enemy units—even those attempting to cloak their movements by operating at night or in ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Shifting the Fog of War
• 1. The Technology Theory of Victory
• 2. A Framework for Understanding Information Practice
• 3. Strategic and Organizational Conditions for Success: The Battle of Britain
• 4. User Innovation and System Management: Aviation Mission Planning Software
• 5. Irregular Problems and Biased Solutions: Special Operations in Iraq
• 6. Increasing Complexity and Uneven Results: Drone Campaigns
• 7. Practical Implications of Information Practice
• Appendix: Methodology
• Notes
• Index