Readings:
  • Situation Awareness Information Dominance & Information Warfare
  • The Unintended Consequences of Information Age Technologies
  • Fighting terrorism and insurgency: shaping the information environment
Since the Gulf War, the U.S. military has advanced quite far both in conceptualizing and applying new information technologies to operations. The new operational concepts promoted in the recent Quadrennial Defense Review demonstrate both their origins in the perceived lessons of the Persian Gulf War and the faith that new applications of information technologies either will, or already have, rectified any shortcomings revealed in that conflict (DoD, 1997). In the process, these concepts also reveal how much the U.S. military has come to believe that information technology can transform warfare.

According to this vision, information technologies in the form of command and control systems, navigation, intelligence collection, surveillance, and reconnaissance provided the backbone for the coalition’s dominance in the Gulf War and provide the basis for the hope of even greater success in the future. The concepts of “Dominant Maneuver,” “Precision Strike,” and even “Focused Logistics” all rest heavily on the perceived lessons of the Gulf War and demand ever more timely, accurate information to succeed. This, in turn, drives the search for ever more-powerful and more-secure information systems.

In the wake of the Gulf War victory, technology emerged as the popular hero of the conflict, although no single technology could claim credit for the victory. However, as Tomahawk missiles, laser-guided bombs, and extremely accurate tank rounds rained down on a nearly inert enemy, one key feature that struck many observers as novel and even revolutionary was the use of, and need for, information by the U.S.- led coalition forces to achieve this effect. If, as the popular saying goes, “anything that can be seen can be killed,” the process of seeing, identifying, and communicating information becomes the key skill element in military effectiveness.

New information weapons will allow the U.S. to influence directly the perception and decisions of the enemy, implying the need for armed forces organizationally and doctrinally capable of waging a battle of words and image rather than of steel. The aim of military power, therefore, according to Richard Szafranski, is “to cause the enemy to choose not to fight by exercising reflexive influence over the products of the adversary’s neo cortex.” (Szafranski, 1997.)

The implications are for the national security effort to shift away from the development of destructive weapon platforms toward improving the intelligence gathering and information-dissemination capabilities that count most in what is essentially a strategic-level psychological operation. Further, the residual force element of the military would consist of small, elite special forces units, in combination with air and space forces, capable of rapid, precise applications of force in support of the information campaign but incapable of large-scale warfare on the traditional model. To be successful in the long term however, a strategy of military dominance requires victories of such a magnitude that they deter most challenges. There are simply not enough resources to do the job if all of the potential challengers decide to become active.


References:
Anderson, Robert H., et al. Securing the U.S. Defense Information Infrastructure: A Proposed Approach. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1999. 179p.

Buchan, Glenn. Information War and the Air Force: Wave of the Future? Current Fad? Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, March 1996. 16p.

DoD—see U.S. Department of Defense.

Szafranski, Richard, “Neocortical Warfare? The Acme of Skill,” in Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1997b), 1997, p. 405

Szafranski, Richard, and Martin C. Libicki, “. . . Or Go Down in Flame? Toward an Airpower Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” Airpower Journal, Fall 1996, pp. 65–79.