NET-​​WAR QUESTIONED

In recent years, the priests of the Pentagon have devel­oped a new ortho­doxy: network-​​centric war­fare. That’s the notion that every infantry­man, every pilot, every drone and every gen­eral will share every­thing they see and hear over an Internet for com­bat. It’s become the unques­tion­able cen­ter­piece of the U.S. military’s vision for its future.
On the eve of Gulf War II, Defense Tech high­lighted a cou­ple of heretics, who weren’t sure network-​​centric fight­ing was such a great idea. Now, Aviation Week reports, more of these thinkers are emerg­ing.
Yale pro­fes­sor Charles Perrow notes that shar­ing infor­ma­tion at all lev­els could eas­ily lead to gen­er­als micro­manag­ing bat­tles.
“It isn’t dif­fi­cult to envi­sion the fog of war being replaced by the fog of sys­tems,” he writes.
Defense ana­lysts Loren Thompson, with the Lexington Institute, says both the U.S. and her adver­saries will have access to Internet tech­nol­ogy.
“This means enemy forces will be able to use it them­selves, and they will under­stand how the U.S. employ­ment of net­works can be used against U.S. forces.“
Network-​​centric war­fare pro­po­nents seem obliv­i­ous to the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties they them­selves might cre­ate, he adds. The Navy, for exam­ple, isn’t requir­ing that its sys­tems with­stand an elec­tro­mag­netic pulse.
“We are act­ing like the dan­ger doesn’t exist at the same time we are pur­su­ing sim­i­lar [anti-​​electronics] weapons,” Thompson told Aviation Week.

September 29th, 2003 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.