This link has been bookmarked by 20 people . It was first bookmarked on 30 Nov 2007, by fureteur fureteur.
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23 Apr 12
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the Internet began as a military project, after all, and each branch of the armed services had ongoing "digitization" programs
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rticle for the January 1998 issue of the naval journal Proceedings
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twork-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future,"
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The US military could use battlefield sensors to swiftly identify targets and bomb them. Tens of thousands of warfighters would act as a single, self-aware, coordinated organism. Better communications would let troops act swiftly and with accurate intelligence, skirting creaky hierarchies. It'd be "a revolution in military affairs unlike any seen since the Napoleonic Age," they wrote
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information management.
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Network-centric wars would be more moral, too.
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warfare would be more ethical
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kill more of the right people quicker.
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US could use military might to create free societies
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e Joshua Davis welcomed in a "new age of fighting that combined precision weapons, unprecedented surveillance of the enemy, agile ground forces, and — above all — a real-time communications network that kept the far-flung operation connected minute by minute."
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Analysts inside and outside the Pentagon credited the network-centric approach for that success. "The successful campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq took far fewer troops and were executed quicker," Rumsfeld proclaimed, because of "advanced technology and skills." The Army committed more than $230 billion to a network-centric makeover, on top of the billions the military had already spent on surveillance, drone aircraft, spy satellites, and thousands of GPS transceivers. General Tommy Franks, leader of both invasions, was even more effusive than Rumsfeld. All the new tech, he wrote in his 2004 memoir, American Soldier, promised "today's commanders the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods."
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But network-centric warfare, with its emphasis on fewer, faster-moving troops, turned out to be just about the last thing the US military needed when it came time to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. A small, wired force leaves generals with too few nodes on the military network to secure the peace. There aren't enough troops to go out and find informants, build barricades, rebuild a sewage treatment plant, and patrol a marketplace.
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"If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can't connect with the local population."
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Inside the Pentagon, the term network-centric warfare is out of fashion, yet countless generals and admirals still adhere to its core principles
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"A well-informed but geographically dispersed force," Garstka and Cebrowski wrote in 1998, should be able to triumph over any foe, regardless of "mission, force size and composition, and geography." But neither Cebrowski nor Garstka was thinking about the kind of combat where foes blend into the populace and seed any stretch of road with bombs. Lawless towns like this can be pacified only by flooding them with troops — collecting tips and knocking heads. That's what Prior needs, not more gadgets. "They're just tools," he says in his flat Iowa accent.
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23 May 10
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Howard Rheingold"How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic"
The future of war began with an act of faith. In 1991, Navy captain Arthur Cebrowski met John Garstka, a captain in the Air Force, at a McLean, Virginia, Bible-study class. The two quickly discovered they shared more than just their conservative Catholic beliefs. They both had an interest in military strategy. And they were both geeks: Cebrowski — who'd been a math major in college, a fighter pilot in Vietnam, and an aircraft carrier commander during Desert Storm — was fascinated with how information technologies could make fighter jocks more lethal. Garstka — a Stanford-trained engineer — worked on improving algorithms used to track missiles." -
04 Feb 10
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John Garstka
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Arthur Cebrowski
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The US military could use battlefield sensors to swiftly identify targets and bomb them. Tens of thousands of warfighters would act as a single, self-aware, coordinated organism. Better communications would let troops act swiftly and with accurate intelligence, skirting creaky hierarchies. It'd be "a revolution in military affairs unlike any seen since the Napoleonic Age," they wrote. And it wouldn't take hundreds of thousands of troops to get a job done — that kind of "massing of forces" would be replaced by information management. "For nearly 200 years, the tools and tactics of how we fight have evolved," the pair wrote. "Now, fundamental changes are affecting the very character of war."
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Network-centric wars would be more moral, too. Cebrowski later argued that network-enabled armies kill more of the right people quicker. With fewer civilian casualties, warfare would be more ethical. And as a result, the US could use military might to create free societies without being accused of imperialist arrogance.
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during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, my colleague Joshua Davis welcomed in a "new age of fighting that combined precision weapons, unprecedented surveillance of the enemy, agile ground forces, and — above all — a real-time communications network that kept the far-flung operation connected minute by minute."
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As a presidential candidate in 1999, George W. Bush embraced the philosophy, as did his eventual choice for defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instituted a massive program to "transform" the armed services. Cebrowski was installed as the head of the newly created Office of Force Transformation. When the US went to war in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, its forces achieved apparent victory with lightning speed. Analysts inside and outside the Pentagon credited the network-centric approach for that success. "The successful campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq took far fewer troops and were executed quicker," Rumsfeld proclaimed, because of "advanced technology and skills."
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The Army committed more than $230 billion to a network-centric makeover, on top of the billions the military had already spent on surveillance, drone aircraft, spy satellites, and thousands of GPS transceivers. General Tommy Franks, leader of both invasions, was even more effusive than Rumsfeld. All the new tech, he wrote in his 2004 memoir, American Soldier, promised "today's commanders the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods."
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And yet, here we are. The American military is still mired in Iraq. It's still stuck in Afghanistan, battling a resurgent Taliban. Rumsfeld has been forced out of the Pentagon. Dan Halutz, the Israeli Defense Forces chief of general staff and net-centric advocate who led the largely unsuccessful war in Lebanon in 2006, has been fired, too. In the past six years, the world's most technologically sophisticated militaries have gone up against three seemingly primitive foes — and haven't won once.
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A small, wired force leaves generals with too few nodes on the military network to secure the peace. There aren't enough troops to go out and find informants, build barricades, rebuild a sewage treatment plant, and patrol a marketplace.
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Retired major general Robert Scales summed up the problem to Congress by way of a complaint from one division commander: "If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can't connect with the local population." How could he? For far too many units, the war had been turned into a telecommute. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon were the first conflicts planned, launched, and executed with networked technologies and a networked ideology. They were supposed to be the wars of the future. And the future lost.
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a handful of soldiers still can't secure a town of more than 50,000.
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Lawless towns like this can be pacified only by flooding them with troops
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The idea is to have as many eyes and ears on the streets, around the shops, and in the mosques as possible. In counterinsurgency, it's better to have a lot of nodes in your network, connecting to the population, than just a few. In fact, that's a key tenet of the new US strategy in Iraq — hiring watchmen who've come to be known in other towns as "alligators" for their light-blue Izod shirts. Prior hasn't had much luck in getting folks in Tarmiyah to sign up; even his own soldiers are reluctant to go out in the daytime.
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General David Petraeus knows all about these mind games. The man in charge of the American military effort in Iraq helped turn soldiers' training from tank-on-tank battles to taking on insurgents. He oversaw the writing of the new counterinsurgency manual that John Nagl worked on. The book counsels officers to reinforce the local economy and politics and build knowledge of the native culture, "an operational code' that is valid for an entire group of people." And the manual blasts the old, network-centric American approach in Iraq. "If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents," it says.
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Petraeus is the man behind the "surge," after all. Anyone who thinks you don't need massing of troops is living in an "academic world," he says. And Petraeus believes "the most important network is still the one that is between the ears of commanders and staff officers."
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What about all the cultural understanding, I ask him. What about nation-building? What about your counterinsurgency manual?
"Well," Petraeus says, "it doesn't say that the best weapons don't shoot. It says sometimes the best weapons don't shoot. Sometimes the best weapons do shoot." A war like Iraq is a mix, he adds: In one part of the country, the military is reinforcing the society, building things; in another, it's breaking them — waging "major combat operations" that aren't all that different from what might have gone down in 2003. And this technology, he says, it's pretty good at 2003-style war.
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The Army has set aside $41 million to build what it calls Human Terrain Teams: 150 social scientists, software geeks, and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year. The first six HTTs are already on the ground. The idea, basically, is to give each commander a set of cultural counselors, the way he has soldiers giving him combat advice.
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In western Afghanistan, for instance, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was being targeted by rockets, over and over, from the vicinity of a nearby village. But no one from the unit had bothered to ask the townspeople why. When the Human Terrain Team finally paid a visit, villagers complained that the Taliban was around only because the Americans didn't provide security. And oh, by the way, they really wanted a volleyball net, too. So a net was acquired. Patrols were started. There hasn't been an attack in two months.
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At the HTT's suggestions, the brigade also invited the province's head mullah to bless a newly restored mosque on the base. He "was so delighted that he recorded an announcement in Pashto and Dari for radio broadcast denouncing the Taliban," an after-action report noted. In his initial evaluation, the brigade commander credits the HTT with an astonishing 60 to 70 percent drop in the number of bombs-and-bullets strikes he has had to make. It's a number that even some HTT members have a hard time believing. But the commander insists that 53 of 83 districts in his area now support the local government. Before the HTT arrived, it was only 19.
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"We got trapped into thinking that killing/destruction mechanisms of the highest technical quality could replace true human understanding. The vote is in, and we were wrong," says Steve Fondacaro, a cleft-chinned, chipped-toothed former Special Forces operator who now heads the HTT program. "We had been trying to take the test without doing the course work. That never works in school, and it hasn't worked any better in war."
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The program is still new, and many questions remain about how it'll actually operate. Will the social scientists — many of them civilian academics — carry guns? Wear uniforms? Will they be conducting fieldwork or just doing research at their desks? How will these people be trained? What kind of credentials do they need? Will commanders listen to what they have to say? And is it even ethical to use their skills in wartime?
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One thing is clear: The Human Terrain Teams will eventually do more than just advise. Soon each team will get a server, a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish, and software for social-network analysis — to diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will mark key cultural and political events. Mapmaking programs will plot out the economic, ethnic, and tribal landscape, just like the command post of the future maps the physical terrain. But those HTT diagrams can never be more than approximations, converting messy analog narratives to binary facts. Warfare will continue to center around networks. But some networks will be social, linking not computers and drones and Humvees but tribes, sects, political parties, even entire cultures. In the end, everything else is just data.
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23 Mar 08
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Tom Woodwardworth thinking about in terms of how schools screw things up
communication control culture government intelligence internet networking
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Tom Woodwardworth thinking about in terms of how schools screw things up
communication control culture government intelligence internet networking
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21 Feb 08
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18 Dec 07
David CorkingOh dear - sounds like the mistakes of Vietnam were made all over again.
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In western Afghanistan, for instance, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was being targeted by rockets, over and over, from the vicinity of a nearby village. But no one from the unit had bothered to ask the townspeople why. When the Human Terrain Team finally paid a visit, villagers complained that the Taliban was around only because the Americans didn't provide security. And oh, by the way, they really wanted a volleyball net, too. So a net was acquired. Patrols were started. There hasn't been an attack in two months...."Stability operations is like soccer. Major combat operations is like football. So it's almost impossible [for one team] to win both the World Cup and the Super Bowl in the same year," he tells me. "Not when you're playing two different games."
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05 Dec 07
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30 Nov 07
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29 Nov 07
ken .From "Network-Centric Warfare" (1998) to Walmart "efficient" NetWar, but still stuck in Iraq, and "they" exploit our media (cnn/youtube) - "how could this be?" - like the circuit switching, ignoring the end to end connection? No Kilcullen?
communication control hierarchy intelligence iraq media military network social strategy technology walmart youtube
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28 Nov 07
Brian Hsinice read on social networks applied. talks also of that new counter-insurgency manual that talks about community building as a strategy
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