Indeed, the ability of Britain’s “Ultra”
and its American counterpart “Magic”
to decipher, respectively, German and
Japanese codes made all the difference in the first few years of the war
when the Allies often had to engage
Axis forces from a position of material
inferiority. Later, when the tide had
turned, codebreaking enabled Allied
victories with fewer casualties due to
foreknowledge of enemy intentions.
The age of computers in battle that
has unfolded over the past 70 years has
proved similar to earlier eras in military
history, with these new informational
tools pointing to new practices. Today, computers serve not only to guide
weapons and break codes but also to
winnow vast amounts of battle-related
information in the search for insight
while facilitating lateral communications, or contact with fellow field units,
not just with distant commanders. It is
this super-empowerment of those who
actually conduct the fighting that most
distinguishes our era of informational
advances from earlier ones.
iMage courtesy of u.s. departMeNt of defeNse
An example is the triumph enabled
by some 200 American Special Forces
soldiers in Operation Enduring Freedom they and local allies conducted
in Afghanistan in late 2001. The Green
Berets rode and fought in the immediate company of a few thousand friendly
Afghans, part of a larger nominal force
of perhaps as many as 40,000 fighters—until then, on the losing end of a
civil war in which 95% of the country
had been ceded to the Taliban.
37 The
Special Forces and those accompanying them were opposed by upward of
70,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters
who had already shown resilience in
the face of a month of American-led
aerial bombing.
7 But “the 200” had a
secret weapon: the tactical Web page.
Originally designed with the idea
of simply allowing these soldiers to
order supplies, the Web page quickly
became their preferred means of communicating timely, targetable information among themselves. The resulting effect was that the teams could
act more swiftly and knowledgeably
and give attack aircraft supporting
them far greater potency, due to what
has been described as their “faster,
unfiltered flow of data.”
9 In just a few
weeks the enemy was driven from
power and out of the country by an omnidirectional assault best described
as a “swarm.” That this success was
eventually squandered, allowing the
Taliban to mount an insurgency of its
own, is more a function of the return
to traditional command arrangements
and concepts than of any fundamental
flaw in network-style operations.
Several years after the initial take-
down of the Taliban, another kind of
military network emerged, this time
in Iraq, where vicious insurgent action
was under way. While senior Ameri-
can generals and Pentagon officials
were having difficulty mastering this
challenge, junior officers doing most
of the actual fighting crafted a way to
share their “lessons learned” and best
practices. Through a Web site called
companycommand.com, initially open
only to company commanders, good
ideas were quickly diffused through-
out the force, sharply improving coun-
terinsurgent practices.
5 Sadly, out of
ostensible security concerns, the Web
site was soon subjected to high-level
oversight that had a chilling effect on
the willingness of junior officers to
freely share their thoughts. Still, an-
other aspect of the power of IT-enabled
networking had been demonstrated.
