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What Modern Militaries Can Learn From Battlestar Galactica
An anonymous reader writes "Modern warfare these days is all about a 'networked environment.' But what happens when such things that make a modern military work breakdown? How would America's armed forces fight if their computers crashed, could not communicate, or were hit with massive viruses? What then? 'There's wisdom in science fiction. The conceit behind the reboot of the sci-fi epic Battlestar Galactica was that networking military forces exposes them to disaster unless commanders and weapons designers think ahead to the repercussions should an enemy exploit or break the network. The mechanical Cylons, arch foes of humanity, are able to crush the humans' battle fleet and bombard their home worlds with nukes by insinuating viruses into networked computers. They sever contact between capital ships and their fighter forces, and they shut down the fleet's and planets' defenses. Having lost the habit of fighting without networked systems, human crews make easy pickings for Cylon predators.'"
Exactly. If they took down our networks we would... not care and keep working?
People have no idea how little actual military stuff is actually networked.
This is less and less true every year. Without networking, forget about using Predator or Reaper drones, for one thing. Forget about chain of command as well, forget about intelligence...moving in either direction. Most importantly, forget about logistics too.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
You're looking for USMC Lt. General Paul Van Riper and his unorthodox response to the 2002 Millennium Challenge wargame.
A similar thing happened in Operation Millenium in 2002. The US commander, General van Riper, in charge of the "red" team (i.e. middle-eastern nation, i.e. Iran) opted to use non tradiational attacks. In effect he launched every available missle on day one at the "blue" fliceet, overwhelming US missle defense systems, and then proceeded to use skifs and speed boats in suicide attacks to avoid any head on engagements. The "blue" team was overwhelemed on the first day and on the second day US command ordered the war game restarted, with much more tight contraints on egagement and tactics. In effect, General van Riper showed that the US was not ready to engage in asymetric warfare in the middle east, and rather than conceding that, they changed and "rigged" the game to show that the US would achieve an easy an descive vicoty. General van Riper resigned in the middle of the game in protest.