Adapting Warfare to Social and Technological Change

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Adapting Warfare to Social and Technological
Change

• Some Tentative Thoughts

Bob McDaniel
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Full Impact of Information Revolution Yet to Come

• Electrification did not raise productivity until
  the structure of factories changed.
• Information Revolutions primary impact will come
  only after other fundamental organizational
  changes.
• We have not yet used technology to change our
  essential relationship to machines, but only to
  perform more efficiently existing processes.

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Steam to Electricity

• Old system designed to reduce friction machines
  were grouped around a prime mover (steam engine)
  - power transmitted by belts, gears and axles.
• New system each machine has its own power source
  and, in order to facilitate the flow of
  production, machines laid out in most efficient
  manner to achieve that end.

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Sundering of the Nation-State

• World is organizing itself into a series of
  interconnected networks.
• Simultaneously, nation states find themselves
  torn in two directions - upward toward
  international security, trade, and social
  organizations and downward by subnational
  movements that want to splinter the state.

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Emergence of the Small

• Empowerment of the individual - entrepreneurship,
  free agency
• Downsizing, outsourcing, networking of businesses
• Growth of regional and cultural consciousness
• Biotechnology - the Genome Project
• Nanotechnology - nanomachines
• Non-linear complex systems and the significance
  of small events (tipping points or "points of
  singularity")

The implication for small armed forces, such as
Canada's, is that a technologically capable force
is now a real possibility.
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Large/Few vs. Small/Many

• In time, the large, the complex, and the few will
  have to yield to the small and the many.
• Systems composed of millions of sensors,
  emitters, microbots, and miniprojectiles, will,
  in concert, be able to detect, track, target, and
  land a weapon on any military object large enough
  to carry a human.
• Analysts talk about the mesh, a system of systems
  including not only links between people and
  computers, but also weapons systems, aeroplanes,
  remote cameras, automated factories and
  warehouses, intelligent buildings, hospitals,
  weather stations, satellites, and so on.

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Parallel with the Economy

• First was the Agrarian Revolution.
• Then followed the Industrial Revolution with mass
  production and mass warfare.
• If we are now in the process of transforming the
  way we create wealth, from the industrial to the
  informational, there is a parallel change taking
  place with warfare.
• It is logical to assume the fourth generation of
  war will also take its shape from society.

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• Fourth-generation warfare is highly irregular.
  "Asymmetric" operations in which a vast
  mismatch exists between the resources and
  philosophies of the combatants. Many small firms
  can outdo the giants through their agility.
• Emphasis is on bypassing an opposing military
  force and striking directly at cultural,
  political, or population targets. Many businesses
  thrive by exploiting niches that the giants find
  difficult or costly to service.
• the implementation of dominating manoeuvre by
  agile military forces deployed on a
  just-in-time basis parallels agile
  manufacturing and just-in-time production systems.

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Paradigm Shift
Paradigm Shift Machine -----gt (Top down Design) Organism (Bottom up Design) Each cell "knows" what to do based on its context.
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Mathematics and Change
Mathematics Type of Problem War Operations Economy
Geometry Line/Area Tactics of line and column Agriculture
Calculus Dynamics Massed firepower Industrial (Steam)
Matrix Algebra Complex Linear Manoeuvre Assembly Line
Fractals Chaos Complex Non-Linear Swarming E-Commerce
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Chaos Wars
If you look around the world today, you can list
approximately 51 significant conflicts going on
somewhere at any given time. US military forces
are active in about five places. But big
conflict, big war seems to be a thing of the
past. Are we in a new era of lots of persistent
low-level conflicts, what could be called the
"era of chaos wars"?
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Why Canadian Forces Excel Tuesday November 27,
2001 The Guardian "What we are looking at is
chaos and ambiguity," says Air Vice-Marshal Brian
Burridge, describing what senior officers in the
military face in a world of low-intensity warfare
and collapsed states. It is their responsibility
to see that those who will be called upon to
command in these circumstances are able to cope.
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Comments about the Canadian Military From A
Soviet Document "One of the serious problems in
planning against Canadian doctrine is that the
Canadians do not read their manuals nor do they
feel any obligation to follow their doctrine." A
German General Officer "The reason that the
Canadian Army does well in wartime, is that war
is chaos, and the Canadian Army practises chaos
on a daily basis." Anonymous 1st Canadian
Division Staff Officer "If we don't know what we
are doing, the enemy certainly can't anticipate
our future actions!"
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The Mesh

• Combat requires doing two things finding targets
  and hitting them (while avoiding the same fate).
• PGMs allow their possessors to hit most
  anything.
• Tomorrow's meshes will allow their possessors to
  find anything worth hitting. Every trend in
  information technology favours the ability to
  collect more and more data about a battlefield,
  knitting a finer and finer mesh which can catch
  smaller and stealthier objects.

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Dominant InfoAge Social Structure is the Network

• Exploration of emergent social structures leads
  to an overarching conclusion dominant functions
  and processes in the information age are
  increasingly organized around networks.
• New information technology paradigm provides
  material basis for network's pervasive expansion
  throughout the entire social structure.

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Hierarchy to Network
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Evolution of Street Gangs
Local International Global
1st Generation 2nd Generation 3rd Generation
Turf Gang Drug Gang Mercenary Gang
Turf Protective Market Penetration Power/FinancialAcquisition
Proto-NetWarrior Emerging NetWarrior NetWarrior
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Citizen Activists

• Ordinary citizens have used the handheld video
  camera, the telephone, the fax and other
  communications technologies to make their causes
  known Philippines, South Africa, Zapatistas, ban
  landmines movement.
• Anti-WTO activists in Seattle were systematic,
  well-organized and well-funded. Using modern
  communications, including the Internet, they were
  able to execute simultaneous actions by means of
  pulsing and swarming tactics coordinated by
  networked and leaderless "affinity groups".

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Empowering Disparate Groups

• A new generation of communications satellites
  will inexpensively link virtually every part of
  the globe. Importantly, one report noted that for
  "disadvantaged regions of the world . . . The
  coming satellite communications revolution could
  be one of those rare technological events that
  enable traditional societies to leap ahead."

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Decline in Distinction Between Military and
Civilian
The distinction between war and peace will be
blurred to the vanishing point. It will be
nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no
definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction
between "civilian" and "military" may disappear.
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Civilian/Police Counter-Terrorism

• Los Angeles has set up a Terrorism Early Warning
  Group (TEW), a hybrid organization blending
  networked organizational features with
  traditional government structures law
  enforcement, fire services and health authorities
  at all levels of government.
• TEW serves as a mechanism for monitoring
  terrorist trends and potentials, and rapidly
  disseminating alerts and warnings.
• TEW uses an "intelligence toolbox" consisting of
  virtual reachback to technological specialists
  and advanced methodologies to help project
  consequences.

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A New Mode of Conflict

• Cyberwar means operating in small, dispersed
  units, so well internetted that they can
  coordinate, coalesce, and then disperse again in
  repeated swarming attacks.
• Initially, light ground units infiltrate and take
  up dispersed positions. As areas cleared,
  helicopter insertions made more frequently.
• Units may then act as scouts and guides
  (sensors), calling in accurate air, artillery and
  missile fire on multiple targets.

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Ever since the end of the Cold War Western forces
have lagged in developing the correct military
response to 4GWa response that calls for
reliance on smaller units versed in manoeuvre
warfare. This kind of fighting eschews heavy
firepower, attrition, and long-range,
high-altitude bombardment. It favours
joint-service operations and close-quarters
combat involving small, fast-moving units with
lighter equipment.
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In tactical terms, this means coordinating
intelligence on a global scale. It means rapier
thrusts against 4GW bases and cells, slicing up
the networks linking the cells, and taking out
the fanatics who supply the brains and the
resources to conduct this kind of indiscriminate
warfare. Because the nation-state no longer holds
a monopoly on destructive force, a most important
change in how 4GW is confronted is to henceforth
ordain that the sanctuary of "national
sovereignty" is no longer sacrosanct, can no
longer be honoured when employed as a facade for
sheltering, endorsing and provisioning non-
national 4GW assets and formations. As in any
conflict, the military task must be to disarm the
enemy and neutralize his offensive capability,
employing the weapons and tactics appropriate for
the task.
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To understand the potential shape of the fourth
generation of war, we must look at the political,
economic, and social changes in society as well
as the changes in technology since the advent of
the third generation of war. Politically the
world has undergone vast changes. The third
generation of war developed when international
relations were defined in terms of the European
nation states that dominated them. In contrast,
the fourth generation of war is coming of age
during a period of exponential increase in the
number and type of players on the international
scene.
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Emergence of Netwar

• Conflicts will increasingly be "netwars" or
  clashes involving networks rather than
  traditional, hierarchical adversaries.

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Network of 9/11 Hijackers
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Frequency Distribution of Links
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Log/Log Graph of HiJacker Net
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Network Analysis
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Bombnet is a group of social network analysts
studying the structure and potential
vulnerabilities of terrorist networks.
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Netwar vs. Cyberwar
Netwar - focuses on new processes enabled by
technology (Networks Nodes/Links) Cyberwar -
technologizes present structures.

• Cyberwar is concerned with traditional military
  aspects like Command, Control, Communications and
  Intelligence, also called C3I.
• Netwar refers to information-related conflict at
  a grand level between nations and societies.

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The Evolution of Flows and Forces

• Melée the primeval state of war with no
  discernible organization, no need for C2, and no
  technologies beyond the visual and the aural
  acuity of the combatants. Aerial dogfights in
  both World Wars are examples.
• Massing where written messages and primitive
  signaling enabled a hierarchically organized
  central authority to command and to control
  dispersed mass forces, achieving maximum shock
  and firepower. These tactics were last seen in
  attrition war on the linear battlegrounds of
  World War I, World War II, and in Korea.

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• Manoeuvre exploiting electronic communication
  and sensing technologies for command and control
  of complex, synchronized, multilinear operations
  that surprised, penetrated and flanked, and
  focused on the decisive point. These have been
  described as two-way technologies that turned
  armed forces into sensing as well as fighting
  units and were most recently seen as AirLand
  doctrine in operation Desert Storm.
• Swarming "a seemingly amorphous, but
  deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic
  way to perform military strikes from all
  directions sustainable pulsing of force or fire
  from a myriad of small, dispersed, networked
  manoeuvre units", and where information and
  sensing technologies empower lower level units to
  function more effectively without hierarchical
  command levels.

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Swarming
It will work best perhaps it will only work
if it is designed mainly around the deployment of
myriad, small, dispersed, networked manoeuvre
units (called "pods" organized in "clusters").
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Tactics of Swarming
Swarming can be conceptually broken into four
stages locate, converge, attack, and disperse.
Swarming forces must be capable of sustainable
pulsing Swarm networks must be able to come
together rapidly and stealthily on a target, then
redisperse and be able to recombine for a new
pulse. It is important that swarm units converge
and attack simultaneously. Each individual swarm
unit (pod) is vulnerable on its own, but if
united with other friendly units, overall
lethality can be multiplied, because the
phenomenon of the swarm effect is greater than
the sum of its parts.
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Swarming PGMs

• Vulnerability of massed formations on the ground
  to airpower and WMD (Weapons of Mass
  Destruction), makes the Dispersed Swarm manoeuvre
  more appropriate for the future.
• Swarm units can use indirect standoff weapons
  (both organic - carried on their persons - and
  nonorganic - a remote asset that has to be called
  to) such as missile-launched "smart" munitions or
  offshore naval platforms deep in the rear.
• Shift from direct-fire to indirect-fire weapons
  will improve the mobility of the individual unit
  on the ground and reduce its signature.

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Some Recent Examples

• The al Qaeda network recognizes the effectiveness
  of swarming. It exploits the nonlinear nature of
  the battle space and sees the value of attacking
  from multiple directions with dispersed units.
• Small bands of widely distributed Kosovo
  Liberation Army fighters and, to a lesser extent,
  allied special forces, provoked the Serbs to
  manoeuvre and fire, instantly making them
  vulnerable to being attacked from the air.

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BattleSwarm

• Cyber/netwar means operating in small, dispersed
  units, so well internetted that they can
  coordinate, coalesce and then dissever in
  repeated swarming attacks.
• In order effectively to disorganize enemy forces,
  it would require mobilizing - and deploying in
  "BattleSwarm" - a force only one tenth the size
  of the enemy forces.
• In a hierarchy, people are defined by the boxes
  they fill on the organizational chart. In a
  network, people change their roles depending on
  the situation.

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• Future armed forces look like hordes of
  cyber-Mongols.
• Arrayed not in platoons or battalions but in
  "clusters" and "pods."
• Call in airstrikes and direct cruise missiles
  remotely.
• Infiltrating the landscape in copters and
  off-road buggies, they float like butterflies but
  sting like sledgehammers.

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Offensive Swarming
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Swarming Attack Pattern
Chaos (Hidden Order)
Break Off Reorganize
Maelstrom (Pattern Recognition)
Ride the Wave
Situational Awareness System
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From Mars to Minerva

• RAND Corporation researchers Arquilla and
  Ronfeldt describe information as a physical
  property, on a par with matter and energy.
• Derive a new conception of power, and therefore
  of war. Instead of being based on material
  resources, from now on power resides in relations
  between people, and thus in organization. From
  the brute power of the god Mars we are passing to
  Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.
• Shift from war based on mutual capacities for
  destruction, to war in which the capacity for
  disruption, or dis-organization, assumes equal
  importance.
• Researchers distinguish four levels of what they
  call their "vision".

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• At the conceptual level, information gives form
  to structure.
• A major consequence of the information revolution
  - the rise of network forms of organization.
• The core of their military doctrine is the notion
  of "BattleSwarm". With each combatant in contact
  with all others, and unit commanders
  communicating with air force commanders and with
  other units it should be possible to employ fewer
  personnel with greater effectiveness.
• The overall strategy is what may be called
  "guarded openness". The free circulation of
  information serves the interests of the Allies
  and victory in tomorrow's wars will go to those
  who can tell the best story. It will be a dirty,
  no-holds-barred propaganda war of competing
  worldviews and alternative visions of the future
  (Meme Wars).

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Power of Mind

• Military power resides in the domain of the mind
  and the will thinking, valuing or attitude, and
  insight or imagination.
• Military power can increase in effectiveness even
  as it decreases in violence.
• May be called neocortical warfare.

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Telematic Laws
Moore's law states that microprocessor chips
will either halve in price or double in power
every 18 months. Gilder's law states that total
bandwidth of communications systems will triple
every 12 months. Metcalfe's law explains, in
global constellations such as the Internet, the
value of the network increases geometrically with
the number of people who use it. Grosch's law
held that doubling the cost of a computer
multiplied its power fourfold. Since then, the
cost- performance ratio of computers has flipped
it is greater at the lower end than the upper
end. Microprocessors deliver more mips (million
instructions per second) for the buck than their
more sophisticated mainframe or even
supercomputer rivals.
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Tactical Command, Control and Communication
Systems (TCCCS)
Athene IRIS -- Battalion Situation
Awareness
System
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Athene - Command Control at the battalion and
above level for use in harsh combat
conditions. SAS- situational awareness system
displays battlefield information in real time at
the Battalion Battle Group and below level.
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Situational Awareness System

• Enables the battlefield commander to track and
  direct all his assets in near real-time, using
  global positioning satellites (GPS).
• Instantaneous moving map manipulation and display
  on a theatre-wide scale.
• Detailed maps are scanned and stored.
• Boosts by a factor of up to 25 times the amount
  of geographic information available to today's
  soldier on the battlefield.

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Digital Mapping

• Enables commanders and planners to view maps at
  the exact scale and level of detail most
  appropriate to the task being considered.
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
  capabilities allow the latest physical and
  objective data to be overlaid, together with
  dispositions of own and opposition resources.
• Transmit map data to operational units for local
  production, on-screen viewing.

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Head Mounted Display
The helmet HUD (heads-up display) allows maps to
be displayed with relative positions of pod
mates, or three-dimensional layouts to be
superimposed in their field of vision. Such
wearable computers link together components such
as a radio system, a rifle-mounted video camera
and thermal sight, and GPS.
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battleWEB Vehicle
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Tactical Infosphere

• Tactical infosphere is a term for information on
  demand, or information pull as opposed to push.
• SAS and Athene programmes designed to provide a
  portion of the information required to fill the
  infosphere.
• Almost every Canadian tactical vehicle and
  selected soldiers on foot will be part of the
  continuously updated database.
• In the future, enemy locations may be entered by
  sensors, including soldiers, and passed
  automatically throughout the system.

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• Disparate pieces of information must be
  integrated into a cohesive system.
• Involves pulling different types of sensor
  information into this infosphere, processing this
  information in different places, transporting it
  and presenting it in a manner that permits a
  commander to make an intelligent decision based
  on the data.

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Real-Time Warfare

• Knowledge army does not require co-location of
  cells to plan, direct and monitor the progress of
  operations.
• Complete sharing of available information and
  using the information-pull principle means that
  up-to-date information is being added to the
  infosphere continually.
• Commander and his staff will be separated
  geographically so they are in the location that
  best supports their individual functions.
• Video conferencing and electronic white boarding
  will enable these virtual CPs to operate in
  real-time.

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Virtual Reality Training for War

• Modified version of the popular game "Doom"
  enables troops to interact and practise fairly
  realistic small unit tactics and fireteam drills.
• Computer simulator makers have developed
  workstations that allow company, battalion,
  brigade, and even division level officers to
  practise large unit engagement techniques in
  realistic virtual circumstances.
• Develop interactive skills that are useful in
  practising modern "Air-Land-Battle" doctrine,
  that is needed in today's extremely fluid
  battlefield environment.

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Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Computing

• By linking together hundreds of soldiers, each
  equipped with a head-mounted display that
  broadcasts details of a virtual environment, it
  would be possible for military units to
  accurately simulate various scenarios.
• Section/pod could virtually practise an attack
  while out in the field, before carrying it out
  for real. "Your training system suddenly becomes
  your mission-planning system. Before I go attack
  that hill. I'm going to run a simulation of it
  with my squad over the next 10 minutes, and
  simulate it virtually while we're waiting here
  for orders."

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Information Warfare

• "Info War" is not the same as intelligence
  operations, although it is clearly related to
  intelligence.
• An attack on an adversarys entire information,
  command and control, and, indeed, decision-making
  system.
• Directed at shrinking or interfering with the
  enemys Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop
  while expanding and improving our own.
• Planners describe the objective of information
  war as "information dominance."

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There are 7 different forms of Information
Warfare (i) command-and-control warfare (which
strikes against the enemy's head and neck), (ii)
intelligence-based warfare (which consists of the
design, protection, and denial of systems that
seek sufficient knowledge to dominate the
battlespace), (iii) electronic warfare (radio-
electronic or cryptographic techniques), (iv)
psychological warfare (in which information is
used to change the minds of friends, neutrals,
and foes), (v) "hacker" warfare (in which
computer systems are attacked), (vi) economic
information warfare (blocking information or
channelling it to pursue economic dominance), and
(vii) cyberwarfare (a grab bag of futuristic
scenarios). All these forms are weakly related.
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Distributed Intelligence

• Most of the recent benefits of information
  technology are going, not into more powerful
  computers, but into more widely distributed
  intelligence.
• Computers can be slaved to sensors and networked.

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Role of Unattended Sensors

• Unattended sensors in a future theatre of
  operation detect enemy movements, identify and
  locate targets, and feed that information via
  unmanned aerial vehicle communications network
  nodes to the command centre.
• Commanders collate their data with other
  information from space and Allied-based sources,
  then signal unattended battlefield and airborne
  weapons to launch against enemy assets.

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• Precision weapons without current, precise
  knowledge of target locations are pretty
  useless. Sandia advocates networking small
  gadgets that might package a global positioning
  locator, sensor, RF communicator, and a small
  computer. These relatively inexpensive devices
  would be widely distributed and in contact with
  each other to give a comprehensive picture of
  enemy movements.
• A fractal approach small patterns that repeat
  larger patterns to integrating security will
  help autonomous groups integrate data currently
  in separate boxes. Targeted groups include law
  enforcement, intelligence, public health, first
  responders, scene commanders, local governments,
  and private citizens.

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Information on Demand
The military is seeking ways to help soldiers on
the ground in places such as Afghanistan get
information faster. The idea is to let them
establish ad hoc computer connections with
forces, say, inside helicopters in Uzbekistan, or
with officers back home and even with allies
abroad, without getting bogged down in multiple
security levels and incompatible software systems.
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Rapid Prototyping Parts on Demand

• Today armies depend on pre-positioned supplies or
  a gigantic logistics tail to provide, say, spare
  helicopter parts.
• Future armies, relying on advanced computing and
  "rapid prototyping," will before long be able to
  make many needed items on the spot. The
  technology can build objects of any desired shape
  out of metal, paper, plastic, or ceramics,
  according to instructions transmitted from data
  bases thousands of miles away.
• This will reduce the need for permanent foreign
  bases or supply depots.

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Grid Technology

• Related to Rapid Prototyping will be the
  widespread implementation of Internet2
  technology, enabling computer users to order
  computing power from the grid.
• Super-high-bandwidth Internet2 and readily
  available supercomputing power promises to
  deliver applications like streamed
  high-definition video, telemedicine, research
  collaboration, and distance learning.
• This will facilitate "reachback", the remote
  contacting of any information source, civilian or
  military, from the battlefield.

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Platform-Centric vs. Net-Centric
There is a parallel in the way Western forces
fight battles today and the way computing worked
in the 1980s. Just as you and your friend worked
on incompatible operating systems and software,
the military operates on independent weapons
platforms. Carrier groups are platforms, as are
Leopard tanks and F-18 aircraft, each operating
with their own standards. And just as you and
your friend wasted time trying to coordinate your
different platforms, military experiments have
found that platform-centric warfare takes twice
as long to destroy 50 percent fewer targets than
does network-centric warfare.
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Net-Centric Warfare
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Value of Netcentricity

• Allows for vast global connectivity, real-time
  collaboration, and rapid and convenient
  information exchange.
• It has produced a significant byproduct as well -
  reduced costs. Moving information is far less
  costly than moving people and things.
• For the individual networked soldier the numerous
  elements of support weapons, intelligence,
  medical services, etc. may be viewed simply as
  peripherals, to be contacted instantaneously as
  required.

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Netcentricity has allowed companies to downsize
while simultaneously increasing productivity. For
example, FedEx's PowerShip customer tracking
software boosted both customer volume and
satisfaction while allowing for an 80-percent
reduction in customer service representatives.
For the military, the promise of being able to
mass effects rather than forces, to leave people
and machines where they are, and to create
smaller, in-theatre footprints, are just a few of
the benefits to be derived from its version of
netcentricity Net-Centric Warfare (NCW).
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NCW describes how the military will organize and
fight in the Information Age. By networking
sensors, decision makers, and shooters, a shared
awareness is created, which enables faster
decision-making, higher tempo operations, greater
lethality, increased survivability, and
self-synchronization. And because NCW promises a
better distribution of resources to tasks than
was possible in the past, operations, which may
have been impossible under a traditional warfare
model, might become feasible in the future.
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New Weapons and Countermeasures

• Precision-Guided Munitions (PGMs)
• Non-Lethal Weapons
• Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles
• Stealth Technology
• Anti-Ballistic Missile System
• Bluetooth and Networking of Sensing Devices
• Space Technology