HOW THE WAR WAS WIRED

Listen to the techno-​​slobberers, and you’d think the net­works that brought unprece­dented com­mu­ni­ca­tion among U.S. troops popped up, fully formed, out of the Mesopotamian sand.
Wired magazine’s Joshua Davis — in one of the most inter­est­ing “embed­ded” accounts from Gulf War II — paints a very dif­fer­ent pic­ture.

What I dis­cov­ered was some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent from the shiny pic­ture of techno-​​supremacy touted by the pro­po­nents of the Rumsfeld doc­trine. I found an unsung corps of geeks impro­vis­ing as they went, cob­bling together a remark­able sys­tem from a hodge­podge of military-​​built net­work­ing tech­nol­ogy, off-​​the-​​shelf gear, miles of Ethernet cable, and com­mer­cial soft­ware. And dur­ing two weeks in the war zone, I never heard any­one men­tion the “rev­o­lu­tion in mil­i­tary affairs” (the catch-​​phrase for a quicker, ultra-​​connected Army). 

In an arti­cle filled with you-​​are-​​there color, the most vivid report comes from a con­voy ride:

The fur­ther down the line I go, the eas­ier it is to see the holes in the sys­tem. “Who the fuck do we look like, Lewis and Clark?” Private Jared Johnson blurts out when I ask him how we ended up lost in the Iraqi desert. I’m headed north again, this time with a 97-​​vehicle con­voy whose mis­sion is to deliver mis­sile launch­ers and set up a Tactical Operations Center just south of the Baghdad sub­urbs. But there’s a prob­lem; the con­voy makes two mas­sive U-​​turns in search of a side road that leads to a much-​​needed fuel stop.
“We’re lima lima mike fox­trot in Iraq,” says Sergeant Frank Cleveland, who’s rid­ing shot­gun in the truck where I’ve hitched a ride.
“What does that mean?” I ask from the back­seat.
“We’re lost like a moth­er­fucker,” he says.
Theoretically, the com­man­der of the con­voy should know its posi­tion. This guy hasn’t been able to fig­ure it out. But even with­out human error the sys­tem can break down. One sol­dier I talked to said the screen icons rep­re­sent­ing the con­voy and all other forces dis­ap­peared when we crossed the bor­der. All that was left was a map of Iraq.
There are other prob­lems. “When we were deployed from the States,” says Lieutenant Marc Lewis — the com­man­der of the convoy’s 27 heavy equip­ment trucks — “they told us that we would be given encrypted, military-​​issue radios when we got here. When we arrived, they told us we should have brought our own.“
What Lewis brought was four Motorola Talkabouts, each with a range of about 1,000 feet. In the half-​​dozen con­voy trips he’s made since arriv­ing in coun­try, Lewis has taken to dis­trib­ut­ing a Talkabout to the first and last trucks. The other two go to vehi­cles at strate­gic points in between. It’s hardly secure. Anybody with a radio could mon­i­tor the con­ver­sa­tions.
Lewis is impro­vis­ing as best he can. Before leav­ing the States, he bought a hand­held eTrex GPS device, which he uses to track each of his for­ays into Iraq. In essence, he’s cre­ated a map of Iraq’s charted and uncharted free­ways and desert roads. He just has no way to share it with any­body. But he is able to nav­i­gate as well as any of the tank or mis­sile com­man­ders he trans­ported. I notice that at least four other sol­diers in the con­voy have brought their own store-​​bought GPS hand­helds. These devices keep the con­voys on track in lieu of hav­ing proper sys­tems.
“If we run out of bat­ter­ies,” Lewis says when show­ing me his map of Iraq, “this war is screwed.”

May 19th, 2003 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.