On the Threshold of Digital Battlefields

The renowned military strategist, Carl von Clausewitz is probably best known for his quote, “War is merely a continuation of politics by other means.” This statement reflects the relationship between military strategy, agency and politics. Armies have always acted as an agent of national will throughout history, with evolving weapons and tactics. George S. Patton, the famous American World War II general once said, “Battles maybe fought with weapons, but they are won with men.” This very true statement may be said to be evolving into something like, “Battles maybe fought with weapons, but they are won with information.”

Information, in fact, has always been an essential tool for military maneuvers. The very basic questions of self and situational awareness have remained the same: “Where are friendly units?”, “Where is the enemy?”, “What are the properties of the environment?”, and so on. What has changed, or developed, are the means and systems that answer these questions and communicate the responses to the army as a whole.

One proverb says, “It is much more easier to fight a hundred individuals than it is to fight an army of a hundred men.” To function as a unified entity an army must move, act and react in coordination with itself, which requires close communication and coordination between its sub-units. This very basic problem of communication and coordination was solved by messengers, smoke, flags and trumpets in ancient times, but now there are computers, satellite communication systems, high power radios and sophisticated sensors.

Since the end of the Cold War, military systems, tactics and strategies have been evolving rapidly, reflecting a vision in which the conventional vertical chain of command is replaced by a spherical network of individuals, “a system of systems,” in which each unit bilaterally exchanges information with others and distributes it to other assets. This evolution, or “transformation,” as most military circles prefer to call it, was enabled by developments in Information Technologies (IT). Advances in computer, communication, data storage and handling systems have geometrically increased the capability to generate, process, analyze, distribute and store information. This dramatic increase in information processing capability presents both advantages and challenges to defense and security strategists and decision makers. Described as “Network Centric Warfare” (NCW) or “Network Enabled Capability” and a number of other phrases, almost all of which contain the word “network,” a new approach has been developed to overcome to this challenge.

To understand the true nature of the paradigm shift that defense and security decision makers face, the developments that led to this inevitable situation and their roots in the first decades of the twentieth century must be examined. This very transformation is going to shape the defense systems, technologies and strategies of the coming decade.