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The New Rules of War
February 25, 2010
In this article from Foreign Policy, John Arquilla, a military strategist who helped coin the concept of "netwar", critiques the failure of the U.S. military to adapt to the changing social and technological conditions that shape conflicts around the world. He writes that in most cases, even when military commanders were open to the concept, they misapplied network-based technologies to old structures and methods of warfare. The article is written from the point of view of someone who is trying to make the U.S. military more effective. However, there are valuable strategic concepts for peace and justice movements to consider.
The New Rules of War
The visionary who first saw the age of "netwar" coming warns that the U.S. military is getting it wrong all over again. Here's his plan to make conflict cheaper, smaller, and smarter.
Every day, the U.S. military spends $1.75 billion, much of it on big ships, big guns, and big battalions that are not only not needed to win the wars of the present, but are sure to be the wrong approach to waging the wars of the future.
In this, the ninth year of the first great conflict between nations and networks, America's armed forces have failed, as militaries so often do, to adapt sufficiently to changed conditions, finding out the hard way that their enemies often remain a step ahead. The U.S. military floundered for years in Iraq, then proved itself unable to grasp the point, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that old-school surges of ground troops do not offer enduring solutions to new-style conflicts with networked adversaries.
So it has almost always been. Given the high stakes and dangers they routinely face, militaries are inevitably reluctant to change. During World War I, the armies on the Western Front in 1915 were fighting in much the same manner as those at Waterloo in 1815, attacking in close-packed formations — despite the emergence of the machine gun and high-explosive artillery. Millions were slaughtered, year after bloody year, for a few yards of churned-up mud. It is no surprise that historian Alan Clark titled his study of the high command during this conflict The Donkeys.Even the implications of maturing tanks, planes, and the radio waves that linked them were only partially understood by the next generation of military men. Just as their predecessors failed to grasp the lethal nature of firepower, their successors missed the rise of mechanized maneuver — save for the Germans, who figured out that blitzkrieg was possible and won some grand early victories. They would have gone on winning, but for poor high-level strategic choices such as invading Russia and declaring war on the United States. In the end, the Nazis were not so much outfought as gang-tackled.
Nuclear weapons were next to be misunderstood, most monumentally by a U.S. military that initially thought they could be employed like any other weapons. But it turned out they were useful only in deterring their use. Surprisingly, it was cold warrior Ronald Reagan who had the keenest insight into such weapons when he said, "A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."
Which brings us to war in the age of information. The technological breakthroughs of the last two decades — comparable in world-shaking scope to those at the Industrial Revolution's outset two centuries ago — coincided with a new moment of global political instability after the Cold War. Yet most militaries are entering this era with the familiar pattern of belief that new technological tools will simply reinforce existing practices.
In the U.S. case, senior officials remain convinced that their strategy of "shock and awe" and the Powell doctrine of "overwhelming force" have only been enhanced by the addition of greater numbers of smart weapons, remotely controlled aircraft, and near-instant global communications. Perhaps the most prominent cheerleader for "shock and awe" has been National Security Advisor James Jones, the general whose circle of senior aides has included those who came up with the concept in the 1990s. Their basic idea: "The bigger the hammer, the better the outcome."
Nothing could be further from the truth, as the results in Iraq and Afghanistan so painfully demonstrate. Indeed, a decade and a half after my colleague David Ronfeldt and I coined the term "netwar" to describe the world's emerging form of network-based conflict, the United States is still behind the curve. The evidence of the last 10 years shows clearly that massive applications of force have done little more than kill the innocent and enrage their survivors. Networked organizations like al Qaeda have proven how easy it is to dodge such heavy punches and persist to land sharp counterblows.
And the U.S. military, which has used these new tools of war in mostly traditional ways, has been staggered financially and gravely wounded psychologically. The Iraq war's real cost, for example, has been about $3 trillion, per the analysis of Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes — and even "official" figures put expenditures around $1 trillion. As for human capital, U.S. troops are exhausted by repeated lengthy deployments against foes who, if they were lined up, would hardly fill a single division of Marines. In a very real sense, the United States has come close to punching itself out since 9/11.
When militaries don't keep up with the pace of change, countries suffer. In World War I, the failure to grasp the implications of mass production led not only to senseless slaughter, but also to the end of great empires and the bankruptcy of others. The inability to comprehend the meaning of mechanization at the outset of World War II handed vast tracts of territory to the Axis powers and very nearly gave them victory. The failure to grasp the true meaning of nuclear weapons led to a suicidal arms race and a barely averted apocalypse during the Cuban missile crisis.
Today, the signs of misunderstanding still abound. For example, in an age of supersonic anti-ship missiles, the U.S. Navy has spent countless billions of dollars on "surface warfare ships" whose aluminum superstructures will likely burn to the waterline if hit by a single missile. Yet Navy doctrine calls for them to engage missile-armed enemies at eyeball range in coastal waters.
The U.S. Army, meanwhile, has spent tens of billions of dollars on its "Future Combat Systems," a grab bag of new weapons, vehicles, and communications gadgets now seen by its own proponents as almost completely unworkable for the kind of military operations that land forces will be undertaking in the years ahead. The oceans of information the systems would generate each day would clog the command circuits so that carrying out even the simplest operation would be a terrible slog.
And the U.S. Air Force, beyond its well-known devotion to massive bombing, remains in love with extremely advanced and extremely expensive fighter aircraft — despite losing only one fighter plane to an enemy fighter in nearly 40 years. Although the hugely costly F-22 turned out to function poorly and is being canceled after enormous investment in its production, the Air Force has by no means given up. Instead, the more advanced F-35 will be produced, at a cost running in the hundreds of billions of dollars. All this in an era in which what the United States already has is far better than anything else in the world and will remain so for many decades.
These developments suggest that the United States is spending huge amounts of money in ways that are actually making Americans less secure, not only against irregular insurgents, but also against smart countries building different sorts of militaries. And the problem goes well beyond weapons and other high-tech items. What's missing most of all from the U.S. military's arsenal is a deep understanding of networking, the loose but lively interconnection between people that creates and brings a new kind of collective intelligence, power, and purpose to bear — for good and ill.
Civil society movements around the world have taken to networking in ways that have done far more to advance the cause of freedom than the U.S. military's problematic efforts to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan at gunpoint. As for "uncivil society," terrorists and transnational criminals have embraced connectivity to coordinate global operations in ways that simply were not possible in the past. Before the Internet and the World Wide Web, a terrorist network operating cohesively in more than 60 countries could not have existed. Today, a world full of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallabs awaits — and not all of them will fail.
But the principles of networking don't have to help only the bad guys. If fully embraced, they can lead to a new kind of military — and even a new kind of war. The conflicts of the future should and could be less costly and destructive, with armed forces more able to protect the innocent and deter or defend against aggression.
Vast tank armies may no longer battle it out across the steppes, but modern warfare has indeed become exceedingly fast-paced and complex. Still, there is a way to reduce this complexity to just three simple rules that can save untold amounts of blood and treasure in the netwar age.
Rule 1: "Many and Small" Beats "Few and Large."
The greatest problem traditional militaries face today is that they are organized to wage big wars and have difficulty orienting themselves to fight small ones. The demands of large-scale conflicts have led to reliance on a few big units rather than on a lot of little ones. For example, the Marines have only three active-duty divisions, the U.S. Army only ten. The Navy has just 11 carrier strike groups, and the Air Force about three dozen attack aircraft "wings." Almost 1.5 million active service members have been poured into these and a few other supporting organizational structures.
It is no wonder that the U.S. military has exhausted itself in the repeated deployments since the 9/11 attacks. It has a chronic "scaling problem," making it unable to pursue smaller tasks with smaller numbers. Add in the traditional, hierarchical military mindset, which holds that more is always better (the corollary belief being that one can only do worse with less), and you get massive approaches to little wars.
This was the case during the Vietnam War, too, when the prevailing military organizational structure of the 1960s — not much different from today's — drove decision-makers to pursue a big-unit war against a large number of very small insurgent units. The final result: 500,000-plus troops deployed, countless billions spent, and a war lost. The iconic images were the insurgents' AK-47 individual assault rifles, of which there were hundreds of thousands in use at any moment, juxtaposed against the U.S. Air Force's B-52s, of which just a hundred or so massed together in fruitless attempts to bomb Hanoi into submission.
The same problem persists today, the updated icons being the insurgents' thousands of improvised explosive devices and the Americans' relative handful of drones. It is ironic that the U.S. war on terrorism commenced in the Afghan mountains with the same type of B-52 bombers and the same problematic results that attended the Vietnam War.
The U.S. military is not unaware of these problems. The Army has incrementally increased the number of brigades — which typically include between 3,000 and 4,000 trigger-pullers — from less than three dozen in 2001 to almost 50 today. And the Marines now routinely subdivide their forces into "expeditionary units" of several hundred troops each. But these changes hardly begin the needed shift from a military of the "few and large" to one of the "many and small."
That's because U.S. military leaders have not sufficiently grasped that even quite small units — like a platoon of 50 or so soldiers — can wield great power when connected to others, especially friendly indigenous forces, and when networking closely with even a handful of attack aircraft.
Yet the evidence is there. For example, beginning in late 2006 in Iraq, the U.S. command shifted little more than 5 percent of its 130,000 troops from about three dozen major (i.e., town-sized) operating bases to more than a hundred small outposts, each manned by about 50 soldiers. This was a dramatic shift from few-large to many-small, and it soon worked wonders in reducing violence, beginning well before the "surge" troops arrived. In part this happened because the physical network of platoon-sized outposts facilitated social networking with the large numbers of small tribal groups who chose to join the cause, forming the core of the "Awakening" movement.
The Pentagon's reluctance to see the new possibilities — reflected in the shrilly repeated calls for more troops, first in Iraq, then in Afghanistan — stems in part from the usual generalized fear of change, but also from concern that a many-and-small force would have trouble against a traditional massed army. Say, like North Korea's.
Then again, perhaps the best example of a many-and-small military that worked against foes of all sizes was the Roman legion. For many centuries, legionary maniples (Latin for "handfuls") marched out — in their flexible checkerboard formations — and beat the massive, balky phalanxes of traditional foes, while dealing just as skillfully with loose bands of tribal fighters.
Rule 2: Finding Matters More Than Flanking.
Ever since Theban general Epaminondas overloaded his army's left wing to strike at the Spartan right almost 2,400 years ago at Leuctra, hitting the enemy in the flank has been the most reliable maneuver in warfare. Flank attacks can be seen in Frederick the Great's famous "oblique order" in his 18th-century battles, in Erwin Rommel's repeated "right hooks" around the British in North Africa in 1941, and in Norman Schwarzkopf's famous "left hook" around the Iraqis in 1991. Flanking has quite a pedigree.
Flanking also formed a basis for the march up Mesopotamia by U.S. forces in 2003. But something odd happened this time. In the words of military historian John Keegan, the large Iraqi army of more than 400,000 troops just "melted away." There were no great battles of encirclement and only a handful of firefights along the way to Baghdad. Instead, Iraqis largely waited until their country was overrun and then mounted an insurgency based on tip-and-run attacks and bombings.
Thus did war cease to be driven by mass-on-mass confrontation, but rather by a hider-finder dynamic. In a world of networked war, armies will have to redesign how they fight, keeping in mind that the enemy of the future will have to be found before it can be fought. To some extent this occurred in the Vietnam War, but that was a conflict during which the enemy obligingly (and quite regularly) massed its forces in major offensives: held off in 1965, defeated in 1968 and 1972, and finally winning in 1975.
In Iraq, there weren't mass assaults, but a new type of irregular warfare in which a series of small attacks no longer signaled buildup toward a major battle. This is the path being taken by the Taliban in Afghanistan and is clearly the concept of global operations used by al Qaeda.
At the same time, the U.S. military has shown it can adapt to such a fight. Indeed, when it finally improved its position in Iraq, the change was driven by a vastly enhanced ability to find the enemy. The physical network of small outposts was linked to and enlivened by a social network of tribal fighters willing to work with U.S. forces. These elements, taken together, shone a light on al Qaeda in Iraq, and in the glare of this illumination the militants were easy prey for the small percentage of coalition forces actually waging the campaign against them.
Think of this as a new role for the military. Traditionally, they've seen themselves largely as a "shooting organization"; in this era, they will also have to become a "sensory organization."
This approach can surely work in Afghanistan as well as it has in Iraq — and in counterinsurgency campaigns elsewhere — so long as the key emphasis is placed on creating the system needed for "finding." In some places, friendly tribal elements might be less important than technological means, most notably in cyberspace, al Qaeda's "virtual safe haven."
As war shifts from flanking to finding, the hope is that instead of exhausting one's military in massive expeditions against elusive foes, success can be achieved with a small, networked corps of "finders." So a conflict like the war on terror is not "led" by some great power; rather, many participate in it, with each adding a piece to the mosaic that forms an accurate picture of enemy strength and dispositions.
This second shift — to finding — has the potential to greatly empower those "many and small" units made necessary by Rule 1. All that is left is to think through the operational concept that will guide them.
Rule 3: Swarming Is the New Surging.
Terrorists, knowing they will never have an edge in numbers, have pioneered a way of war that allows them to make the most of their slender resources: swarming. This is a form of attack undertaken by small units coming from several directions or hitting many targets at the same time. Since 9/11, al Qaeda has mounted but a few major stand-alone strikes — in Bali, Madrid, and London — while the network has conducted multiple significant swarming campaigns in Turkey, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia featuring "wave attacks" aimed at overloading their targets' response capabilities. Such attacks have persisted even in post-surge Iraq where, as Gen. David Petraeus noted in a recent speech, the enemy shows a "sophistication" among the militants "in carrying out simultaneous attacks" against major government targets.
Perhaps the clearest example of a terrorist swarm was the November 2008 attack on Mumbai, apparently mounted by the Lashkar-e-Taiba group. The assault force consisted of just 10 fighters who broke into five two-man teams and struck simultaneously at several different sites. It took more than three days to put them down — and cost the lives of more than 160 innocents — as the Indian security forces best suited to deal with this problem had to come from distant New Delhi and were configured to cope with a single threat rather than multiple simultaneous ones.
In another sign of the gathering swarm, the August 2008 Russian incursion into Georgia, rather than being a blast from the Cold War past, heralded the possibility that more traditional armies can master the art of omnidirectional attack. In this instance, Russian regular forces were augmented by ethnic militias fighting all over the area of operations — and there was swarming in cyberspace at the same time. Indeed, the distributed denial of service attack, long a staple of cyberwarriors, is a model form of swarming. And in this instance, Georgian command and control was seriously disrupted by the hackers.
Simultaneous attack from several directions might be at the very cutting edge in conflict, but its lineage is quite old. Traditional tribal warfare, whether by nomadic horse archers or bush fighters, always featured some elements of swarms. The zenith of this kind of fighting probably came with the 13th-century Mongols, who had a name for this doctrine: "Crow Swarm." When the attack was not carried out at close quarters by charging horsemen, but was instead conducted via arrows raining down on massed targets, the khans called it "Falling Stars." With such tactics, the Mongols carved out the largest empire the world has ever seen, and kept it for a few centuries.
But swarming was eclipsed by the rise of guns in the 15th century, which strongly favored massed volley fire. Industrial processes encouraged even more massing, and mechanization favored large flank maneuvers more than small swarms. Now again, in an age of global interdependence replete with advanced information technologies, even quite small teams of fighters can cause huge amounts of disruption. There is an old Mongol proverb: "With 40 men you can shake the world." Look at what al Qaeda did with less than half that number on Sept. 11, 2001.
This point was made by the great British strategist B.H. Liddell Hart in his biography of T.E. Lawrence, a master of the swarm in his own right. Liddell Hart, writing in 1935, predicted that at some point "the old concentration of force is likely to be replaced by an intangibly ubiquitous distribution of force — pressing everywhere, yet assailable nowhere."
Now, swarming is making a comeback, but at a time when few organized militaries are willing or able to recognize its return. For the implications of this development — most notably, that fighting units in very small numbers can do amazing things if used to swarm — are profoundly destabilizing. The most radical change is this: Standing armies can be sharply reduced in size, if properly reconfigured and trained to fight in this manner. Instead of continually "surging" large numbers of troops to trouble spots, the basic response of a swarm force would be to go swiftly, in small numbers, and strike the attackers at many points. In the future, it will take a swarm to defeat a swarm.
Almost 20 years ago, I began a debate about networks that blossomed into an unlikely friendship with Vice Adm. Art Cebrowski, the modern strategic thinker most likely to be as well remembered as Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great American apostle of sea power. He was the first in the Pentagon power structure to warm to my notions of developing fighting networks, embracing the idea of opening lots of lateral communications links between "sensors and shooters." We disagreed, however, about the potential of networks. Cebrowski thought that "network-centric warfare" could be used to improve the performance of existing tools — including aircraft carriers — for some time to come. I thought that networking implied a wholly new kind of navy, one made up of small, swift vessels, many of them remotely operated. Cebrowski, who passed away in late 2005, clearly won this debate, as the U.S. Navy remains heavily invested in being a "few-large" force — if one that is increasingly networked. In an implicit nod to David Ronfeldt's and my ideas, the Navy even has a Netwar Command now.
Swarming has also gained some adherents. The most notable has been Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who famously used swarm tactics in the last great Pentagon war game, "Millennium Challenge 2002," to sink several aircraft carriers at the outset of the imagined conflict. But rather than accept that something quite radical was going on, the referees were instructed to "refloat" the carriers, and the costly game — its price tag ran in the few hundred millions — continued. Van Riper walked out. Today, some in the U.S. military still pursue the idea of swarming, mostly in hopes of employing large numbers of small unmanned aerial vehicles in combat. But military habits of mind and institutional interests continue to reflect a greater audience for surges than swarms.
What if senior military leaders wake up and decide to take networks and swarming absolutely seriously? If they ever do, it is likely that the scourges of terrorism and aggression will become less a part of the world system. Such a military would be smaller but quicker to respond, less costly but more lethal. The world system would become far less prone to many of the kinds of violence that have plagued it. Networking and swarming are the organizational and doctrinal keys, respectively, to the strategic puzzle that has been waiting to be solved in our time.
A networked U.S. military that knows how to swarm would have much smaller active manpower — easily two-thirds less than the more than 2 million serving today — but would be organized in hundreds more little units of mixed forces. The model for military intervention would be the 200 Special Forces "horse soldiers" who beat the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan late in 2001. Such teams would deploy quickly and lethally, with ample reserves for relieving "first waves" and dealing with other crises. At sea, instead of concentrating firepower in a handful of large, increasingly vulnerable supercarriers, the U.S. Navy would distribute its capabilities across many hundreds of small craft armed with very smart weapons. Given their stealth and multiple uses, submarines would stay while carriers would go. And in the air, the "wings" would reduce in size but increase in overall number, with mere handfuls of aircraft in each. Needless to say, networking means that these small pieces would still be able to join together to swarm enemies, large or small.
Is such a shift feasible? Absolutely. Big reductions in the U.S. military are nothing new. The massive demobilization after World War II aside, active forces were reduced 40 percent in the few years after the Vietnam War and by another third right after the end of the Cold War. But the key is not so much in cutting as it is in redesigning and rethinking.
But what happens if the status quo prevails and the potential of this new round of changes in strategic affairs is ignored or misinterpreted? Failure awaits, at ruinous cost.
The most likely form catastrophe could take is that terrorist networks would stay on their feet long enough to acquire nuclear weapons. Even a handful of warheads in Osama bin Laden's hands would give him great coercive power, as a network cannot be targeted for retaliation the same way a country can. Deterrence will lie in tatters. If there is ever to be a nuclear Napoleon, he will come from a terrorist network.
Within the U.S. military, the danger is that senior commanders will fall back on a fatalism driven by their belief that both congressional and industrial leaders will thwart any effort at radical change. I have heard this objection countless times since the early 1990s, repeated mantra-like, all the way up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thus the mighty U.S. war machine is like a Gulliver trussed up by Lilliputian politicians and businessmen.
The irony, however, is that the U.S. military has never been in a better position to gain acceptance for truly transformational change. Neither party in Congress can afford to be portrayed as standing in the way of strategic progress, and so, whatever the Pentagon asks for, it gets. As for defense contractors, far from driving the agenda, they are much too willing to give their military customers exactly what they demand (rather than, perhaps, something better). If the U.S. armed forces call for smaller, smarter weapons and systems to support swarming, they will get them.
Beyond the United States, other countries' security forces are beginning to think along the lines of "many and small," are crafting better ways to "find," and are learning to swarm. Chinese naval thought today is clearly moving in this direction. Russian ground forces are, too. Needless to say, terrorist networks are still in the lead, and not just al Qaeda. Hezbollah gave quite a demonstration of all three of the new rules of war in its summer 2006 conflict with Israel, a virtual laboratory test of nation versus network — in which the network more than held its own.
For the U.S. military, failing a great leap forward in self-awareness of the need for radical change, a downward budgetary nudge is probably the best approach — despite President Barack Obama's unwillingness to extend his fiscal austerity program to security-related expenditures. This could take the form of a freeze on defense spending levels, to be followed by several years of, say, 10 percent annual reductions. To focus the redesign effort, a moratorium would be declared on all legacy-like systems (think aircraft carriers, other big ships, advanced fighters, tanks, etc.) while they are subjected to searching review. It should not be assumed that the huge sums invested in national defense have been wisely spent.
To most Americans who think that being strong on defense means devoting more resources and building bigger systems, this suggestion to cut spending will sound outrageous. But being smarter about defense might lower costs even as effectiveness improves. This pattern has held throughout the transformations of the last few decades, whether in farming or in industry. Why should the military be exempt?
There's real urgency to this debate. Not only has history not ended with the Cold War and the advent of commerce-driven globalization, but conflict and violence have persisted — even grown — into a new postmodern scourge.
Indeed, it is ironic that, in an era in which the attraction to persuasive "soft power" has grown dramatically, coercive "hard power" continues to dominate in world affairs. This is no surprise in the case of rogue nations hellbent on developing nuclear arsenals to ensure their security, nor when it comes to terrorist networks that think their essential nature is revealed in and sustained by violent acts. But this primary reliance on coercive capabilities is also on display across a range of countries great and small, most notably the United States, whose defense policy has over the past decade largely become its foreign policy.
From the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to simmering crises with North Korea and Iran, and on to longer-range strategic concerns about East Asian and Central European security, the United States today is heavily invested in hard-power solutions. And it will continue to be. But if the radical adjustments in strategy, organization, and doctrine implied by the new rules of war are ignored, Americans will go on spending more and getting less when it comes to national defense. Networks will persist until they have the capability to land nuclear blows. Other countries will leapfrog ahead of the United States militarily, and concepts like "deterrence" and "containment" of aggression will blow away like leaves in the wind.
So it has always been. Every era of technological change has resulted in profound shifts in military and strategic affairs. History tells us that these developments were inevitable, but soldiers and statesmen were almost always too late in embracing them — and tragedies upon tragedies ensued. There is still time to be counted among the exceptions, like the Byzantines who, after the fall of Rome, radically redesigned their military and preserved their empire for another thousand years. The U.S. goal should be to join the ranks of those who, in their eras, caught glimpses of the future and acted in time to shape it, saving the world from darkness.
John Arquilla is professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and author of Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military.
The Critical Networks Are Social – Not Electronic
November 27, 2007
The Project Kai e'e / UARC scandal at the University of Hawai'i was all about network centric warfare technology research, testing and development and the use of a public university as the front to channel congressionally earmarked funds to defense contractors conducting their programs at the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kaua'i. This article is a sobering critique of the limits of technology in warfare.
WIRED MAGAZINE: Wired Issue 15.12
How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social – Not Electronic
By Noah Shachtman Email 11.27.07
The future of war began with an act of faith. In 1991, Navy captain Arthur Cebrowski met John Garstka, a captain in the Air Force, at a McLean, Virginia, Bible-study class. The two quickly discovered they shared more than just their conservative Catholic beliefs. They both had an interest in military strategy. And they were both geeks: Cebrowski – who'd been a math major in college, a fighter pilot in Vietnam, and an aircraft carrier commander during Desert Storm – was fascinated with how information technologies could make fighter jocks more lethal. Garstka – a Stanford-trained engineer – worked on improving algorithms used to track missiles.
Over the next several years, the two men traded ideas and compared experiences. They visited businesses embracing the information revolution, ultimately becoming convinced that the changes sweeping the corporate world had applications for the military as well. The Defense Department wasn't blind to the power of networks, of course – the Internet began as a military project, after all, and each branch of the armed services had ongoing "digitization" programs. But no one had ever crystallized what the information age might offer the Pentagon quite like Cebrowski and Garstka did. In an article for the January 1998 issue of the naval journal Proceedings, "Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future," they not only named the philosophy but laid out a new direction for how the US would think about war.
Their model was Wal-Mart. Here was a sprawling, bureaucratic monster of an organization – sound familiar? – that still managed to automatically order a new lightbulb every time it sold one. Warehouses were networked, but so were individual cash registers. So were the guys who sold Wal-Mart the bulbs. If that company could wire everyone together and become more efficient, then US forces could, too. "Nations make war the same way they make wealth," Cebrowski and Garstka wrote. Computer networks and the efficient flow of information would turn America's chain saw of a war machine into a scalpel.
The US military could use battlefield sensors to swiftly identify targets and bomb them. Tens of thousands of warfighters would act as a single, self-aware, coordinated organism. Better communications would let troops act swiftly and with accurate intelligence, skirting creaky hierarchies. It'd be "a revolution in military affairs unlike any seen since the Napoleonic Age," they wrote. And it wouldn't take hundreds of thousands of troops to get a job done – that kind of "massing of forces" would be replaced by information management. "For nearly 200 years, the tools and tactics of how we fight have evolved," the pair wrote. "Now, fundamental changes are affecting the very character of war."
Network-centric wars would be more moral, too. Cebrowski later argued that network-enabled armies kill more of the right people quicker. With fewer civilian casualties, warfare would be more ethical. And as a result, the US could use military might to create free societies without being accused of imperialist arrogance.
It had a certain geek appeal, to which Wired was not immune. Futurist Alvin Toffler talked up similar ideas – before they even had a name – in the magazine's fifth issue, in 1993. And during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, my colleague Joshua Davis welcomed in a "new age of fighting that combined precision weapons, unprecedented surveillance of the enemy, agile ground forces, and – above all – a real-time communications network that kept the far-flung operation connected minute by minute."
As a presidential candidate in 1999, George W. Bush embraced the philosophy, as did his eventual choice for defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instituted a massive program to "transform" the armed services. Cebrowski was installed as the head of the newly created Office of Force Transformation. When the US went to war in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, its forces achieved apparent victory with lightning speed. Analysts inside and outside the Pentagon credited the network-centric approach for that success. "The successful campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq took far fewer troops and were executed quicker," Rumsfeld proclaimed, because of "advanced technology and skills." The Army committed more than $230 billion to a network-centric makeover, on top of the billions the military had already spent on surveillance, drone aircraft, spy satellites, and thousands of GPS transceivers. General Tommy Franks, leader of both invasions, was even more effusive than Rumsfeld. All the new tech, he wrote in his 2004 memoir, American Soldier, promised "today's commanders the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods."
And yet, here we are. The American military is still mired in Iraq. It's still stuck in Afghanistan, battling a resurgent Taliban. Rumsfeld has been forced out of the Pentagon. Dan Halutz, the Israeli Defense Forces chief of general staff and net-centric advocate who led the largely unsuccessful war in Lebanon in 2006, has been fired, too. In the past six years, the world's most technologically sophisticated militaries have gone up against three seemingly primitive foes – and haven't won once.
How could this be? The network-centric approach had worked pretty much as advertised. Even the theory's many critics admit net-centric combat helped make an already imposing American military even more effective at locating and killing its foes. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar were broken almost instantly. But network-centric warfare, with its emphasis on fewer, faster-moving troops, turned out to be just about the last thing the US military needed when it came time to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. A small, wired force leaves generals with too few nodes on the military network to secure the peace. There aren't enough troops to go out and find informants, build barricades, rebuild a sewage treatment plant, and patrol a marketplace.
For the first three years of the Iraq insurgency, American troops largely retreated to their fortified bases, pushed out woefully undertrained local units to do the fighting, and watched the results on feeds from spy drones flying overhead. Retired major general Robert Scales summed up the problem to Congress by way of a complaint from one division commander: "If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can't connect with the local population." How could he? For far too many units, the war had been turned into a telecommute. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon were the first conflicts planned, launched, and executed with networked technologies and a networked ideology. They were supposed to be the wars of the future. And the future lost.
Inside the Pentagon, the term network-centric warfare is out of fashion, yet countless generals and admirals still adhere to its core principles. On the streets of Iraq, though, troops are learning to grapple with the guerrilla threat. And that means fighting in a way that couldn't be more different from the one Donald Rumsfeld embraced. The failures of wired combat are forcing troops to improvise a new, socially networked kind of war.
Tarmiyah, located about 20 miles north of Baghdad, is an ugly town – traced with rivulets of sewage, patrolled by stray dogs, and strewn with rubble and garbage. Insurgents fleeing US military crackdowns in Baghdad and, farther north, in Baqubah, have flooded the city. The local police quit en masse almost a year ago, leaving the security of Tarmiyah's 50,000 residents to 150 men from the US Army's Fourth Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment – known since an early-1900s tour of duty in China as the Manchus.
Typically, soldiers spend hours of every day at war just trying to figure out where their comrades are, and how to maneuver together. But hand out GPS receivers and put everyone's signals on a map, and those tasks become a whole lot simpler. Luckily for the Manchus, the 4/9 is arguably the most wired unit in the Army. Select troops wear an experimental electronics package, including a helmet-mounted monocle that displays a digital map of Tarmiyah with icons for each of their vehicles and troops. The unit's commander, William Prior, rides an upgraded Stryker armored vehicle that shows the same info on one of many screens. It's packed with battle command stations, advanced radios, remote-controlled weapons turrets, and satellite network terminals. No commander at his level has ever been able to see so many of his men so easily.
"It increases the unit's combat power, no question," Prior says. Trim and dark-eyed, the lieutenant colonel knows his tech. He has a master's in physics and taught science at West Point in the late 1990s.
During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, only a fraction of the Humvees, tanks, and helicopters invading the country were equipped with these kind of readouts on the position of other US vehicles. Still, enough had them to allow the troops pushing to Baghdad to execute perilous maneuvers, like sending one unit through another's kill zone – a move made even more hair-raising by dust storms that turned the air opaque.
Today, every three-man team in the Manchus is an icon on every other team's monocles. Network-centric doctrine says that these plugged-in soldiers should be able to cover a bigger swath of the battlefield and take on more enemies. And, yes, the gear does let them clear neighborhoods more efficiently and respond to enemy attacks more quickly. But a handful of soldiers still can't secure a town of more than 50,000. Half a dozen Manchus have been killed or wounded by snipers during their five months in Tarmiyah. Prior has handed out 25 Purple Hearts to the 150-man Comanche Company guarding Tarmiyah. It's even worse outside town, where the equally small Blowtorch Company was trying to keep the peace in an area three times the size of Manhattan, until the higher-ups ordered the company onto other missions.
"A well-informed but geographically dispersed force," Garstka and Cebrowski wrote in 1998, should be able to triumph over any foe, regardless of "mission, force size and composition, and geography." But neither Cebrowski nor Garstka was thinking about the kind of combat where foes blend into the populace and seed any stretch of road with bombs. Lawless towns like this can be pacified only by flooding them with troops – collecting tips and knocking heads. That's what Prior needs, not more gadgets. "They're just tools," he says in his flat Iowa accent.
But Prior has just caught a break: Another several hundred soldiers, Special Forces operators, and Iraqi troops have descended on the city to kick in doors, drop bombs on extremist hideouts, and drive out the insurgents. Those men will leave eventually, though, and to sustain the gains they make, Prior is supposed to recruit civilians into a kind of neighborhood watch. The idea is to have as many eyes and ears on the streets, around the shops, and in the mosques as possible. In counterinsurgency, it's better to have a lot of nodes in your network, connecting to the population, than just a few. In fact, that's a key tenet of the new US strategy in Iraq – hiring watchmen who've come to be known in other towns as "alligators" for their light-blue Izod shirts. Prior hasn't had much luck in getting folks in Tarmiyah to sign up; even his own soldiers are reluctant to go out in the daytime.
But the extra boots on the ground have given Prior some space. If he can recruit a few alligators in a hurry, the extremists will be less likely to come back. So he has started spending quality time drinking chai with local leaders instead of fighting a shooting war.
We walk into the home of Tarmiyah's former mayor, sheikh Sayeed Jassem. Everyone in town agrees he'd be the guy to help sign up alligators. One problem: Jassem is in jail on charges of embezzlement and funneling money to the insurgency. The Iraqi government is in no mood to let him out. That makes the several dozen tribal leaders sitting in Jassem's 40-foot-long, lavishly carpeted living room extremely grouchy. "Sayeed, he knows every sheikh, he knows all the children. The first step is releasing him. Then we can arrange security," says burly, balding, gravel-voiced Abu Ibrahim. Next to him, in a white headdress and wearing a pencil-thin mustache, Jassem's cousin Abu Abbas nods. "I couldn't make a decision until he's free."
Prior blinks. Abbas went to Jassem's jail cell the day before yesterday and got the sheikh's blessing to proceed. "But you saw him yesterday, with your own eyes, did you not?" he asks. Abbas starts saying something about his uncles. Prior turns to Ibrahim. "Yesterday, you said you'd have 100 men. All I'm asking for is 30. Five men, in eight-hour shifts, to guard the sheikh's home, and to guard the Tarmiyah gate" – the main entrance to the town. The meeting has been going on for two hours. That's typical. But after a few of these, Prior has finally learned that such gatherings are as much about performance as ticking off agenda items. He booms out in a Broadway-loud voice: "Are there 30 strong men in Tarmiyah who can do this?"
OK, OK, everyone answers, of course there are, don't get so excited. They spend the next few hours drinking cup after cup of chai, hammering out exactly what the recruiting announcement will say, whether these guardians will have badges, how they'll be vetted. Finally, they agree that 30 men will meet back at the house tomorrow morning. Prior's soldiers print up 50 makeshift applications – better to have a few extra, just in case.
The next day, we go back to Jassem's house. More than 500 men are braving the heat, waiting in front to sign up as alligators. A week later, that number swells to more than 1,400. In the month since, Prior has downed a lot more chai. But he hasn't had to award a single Purple Heart.
Outside of Fallujah, on a sprawling US military base, there's an old barracks supposedly built for Uday Hussein's personal shock troops. Down at the dimly lit end of one hallway is a tiled bathroom that's been converted into a tiny office. Inside, three screens sit on a desk, displaying a set of digital maps showing a God's-eye view of the entire country. Every American tank and truck is marked with blue icons. Every recent insurgent attack is marked in red. There are more than 1,100 units like this one across the country, and the site of every major US military center in Iraq is connected to the same system. The brass calls these futuristic command posts… well, it calls them command posts of the future, or CPOF. (Grunts call them the command posts of the right now – C-PORN.) This is network-centric warfare, translated from journal theory to war-zone reality.
Fallujah isn't more than 10 miles away, but staring at those three screens feels like observing Iraq from another continent – maybe another planet. Outside, it's ant-under-a-magnifying-glass hot. In here I have to pull my arms inside my T-shirt, the thermostat is turned so low. Across the city, marines do their best to predict the insurgents' next moves. But in front of the command post, we have so much information at our fingertips it makes Prior's tech look like a beta-test version of Missile Command. "There's a sea of information here. All you have to learn to do is fish in it," says Jim Kanzenbach, a tan, goateed Army contractor and trainer with a southern-accented baritone.
Kanzenbach taps the mouse a few times. Red diamonds representing all of the insurgent sigacts (military-speak for "significant activities") array themselves into a timeline. He sorts it by day of the week, then by hour of the day. White space appears during a particular hour; there don't seem to be any sigacts then. "If I was going to run a convoy, that would be the better time."
He clicks again, and the middle screen switches to a 3-D map of an Iraqi town from a driver's point of view. Kanzenbach smiles, and his mile-a-minute Texas patter goes hypersonic. "Now let's plan the route. You've got a mosque here. An IED happened over there two weeks ago. Here's the one that happened yesterday. Hey, that's too close. Let's change my route. Change the whole damn thing." He guides me through capability after capability of the command post – all kinds of charts, overlays, and animations. "But wait – there's more," he says. "You wanna see where all the Internet cafés are in Baghdad?"
It's hard not to get caught up in Kanzenbach's enthusiasm. But back in the US, John Nagl, one of the authors of the Army's new counterinsurgency manual, isn't impressed. He's a lieutenant colonel and an Iraq vet, an Army batallion commander at Fort Riley in Kansas. He's also the author of several influential articles and books about counterinsurgency, including Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife, an analysis of Vietnam and Malaya. When I ask him about CPOF, he's more interested in what the screens don't show. Historical sigacts don't actually tell you where the next one's going to be. Or who's going to do it. Or who's joining them. Or why. "The police captain playing both sides, the sheikh skimming money from a construction project," Nagl asks, "what color are they?"
CPOF was designed for planning short, decisive battles against another regular army – the Soviets, the Chinese, Saddam's Republican Guard, whoever – as long as they had tanks to destroy, territory to seize, and leaders to kill. The counterinsurgency game has completely different rules. The goal here is to stabilize a government, not bring it down; to persuade people to cooperate, not bludgeon them into submission. In fact, many of these kinetic bombs-and-bullets activities can actually undermine a counterinsurgency, creating more enemies than they kill. "Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot," Nagl's counterinsurgency manual says. Instead, it advises troops to get to know the locals – both individually and as groups – and gain their trust. The locals generally know which of their neighbors are insurgents and which aren't; they're already plugged into the communal network. "Arguably," the manual says, "the decisive battle is for the people's minds."
Cebrowski and Garstka wrote about a different kind of power, one that came when connected troops started to share information in ways that circumvented, and bypassed, the Industrial Age military chain of command. But that helps only if troops can connect in the first place. It can take up to a week for them to wrangle their laptops into updating the biometric databases that track who gets in and out of Fallujah. Intelligence reports can take even longer. The people best equipped to win the battle for people's minds – US troops on the ground, local policemen, Iraqi Army officers, tribal leaders – are left out of CPOF's network. It's a bandwidth hog, and the soldiers and marines fighting these counterinsurgencies aren't exactly carrying around T3 lines. Only recently did infantrymen like the ones in Fallujah even get their own radios. The Pentagon's sluggish structure for buying new gear means it can take up to a decade to get soldiers equipped. (Though to be fair, CPOF was purchased and deployed years ahead of schedule.) In Fallujah, the marines of Fox Company, based in an abandoned train station, mostly use their CPOF terminal to generate local maps, which they export to PowerPoint. Their buddies in Fox Company's first platoon, working out of a police precinct, have it even worse. When they want to get online, they have to drive to the station.
As for Iraqi access, while CPOF technically isn't classified, all of the data on it is. Locals can't see the information or update any of those databases with their own intelligence. A key tenet of network theory is that a network's power grows with every new node. But that's only if every node gets as good as it gives. In Iraq, the most important nodes in this fight are all but cut off.
Meanwhile, insurgent forces cherry-pick the best US tech: disposable email addresses, anonymous Internet accounts, the latest radios. They do everything online: recruiting, fundraising, trading bomb-building tips, spreading propaganda, even selling T-shirts. And every American-financed move to reinforce Iraq's civilian infrastructure only makes it easier for the insurgents to operate. Every new Internet café is a center for insurgent operations. Every new cell tower means a hundred new nodes on the insurgent network. And, of course, the insurgents know the language and understand the local culture. Which means they plug into Iraq's larger social web more easily than an American ever could. As John Abizaid, Franks' successor at Central Command, told a conference earlier this year, "This enemy is better networked than we are."
The insurgent groups are also exploiting something that US network-centric gurus seem to have missed: All of us are already connected to a global media grid. Satellite television, radio, and the Internet mean that many of the most spectacular attacks in Iraq are deliberately staged for the cameras, uploaded to YouTube, picked up by CNN, and broadcast around the world.
American forces have been trying to solve the insurgent puzzle in Fallujah since 2003. Massive battles devastated the town, damaging more than half the homes there and driving out 90 percent of the populace. The insurgents kept coming back. But in the past year, things have shifted. Today, Fallujah is calm: Shops are open, kids are in school, men are smoking their cigarettes and holding hands in outdoor cafs. "The people just decided they couldn't take al Qaeda anymore," says George Benson, executive officer of the marines' Second Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team Six, which is responsible for the town. Benson believes that a beefy, blue-eyed kid raised in the Cleveland suburbs is a big part of the reason Fallujah has gone so quiet.
His name is Joe Colabuno, and he's a sergeant who works in psychological operations – psyops, in military-speak. His job is to win the hearts-and-minds battle, and his tools are almost comically simple: posters drawn in Photoshop, loudspeaker and radio broadcasts pasted together with SonicStage and saved to MiniDiscs, the occasional newspaper article, and, above all, his own big mouth. Arab culture lives by its oral traditions; talk is often the most important weapon. "I find the right people to shape, and they shape the rest," Colabuno says.
Just as in Tarmiyah, troops in Fallujah are looking to recruit locals to keep tabs on their neighborhoods. Yesterday, on the west side of town, an alligator helped catch one of the Americans' top insurgent targets in Fallujah. After seeing a photograph, the watchman ID'd the guy as a neighbor, living just a few houses down the street.
But an alligator-recruiting drive yesterday in the Askeri district, in the northeastern corner of town, didn't go so well. The marines got less than half of the 125 they were looking for. So Colabuno hops into a Humvee to find out why.
We pull up to a narrow, unpaved street alongside the Askeri recruiting station. A group of seven men sit on the gravel, beneath a set of drying sheets. In the middle of the crowd, leaning on a cane, fingering prayer beads and dressed in white, is a rotund, bearded man. He's clearly the ringleader. Colabuno and his wire-thin interpreter, Leo, approach him. In every other district, they've recruited plenty of alligators. "Why not in Askeri?" Colabuno asks the ringleader.
The money's not good enough, he answers. An alligator makes only $50 a month; day laborers get $8 a day – when there's work, that is.
"That's the weakest argument ever," Colabuno says. The men looked stunned; Americans don't normally speak this directly – they're usually deferential to the point of looking weak, or just condescending.
"Do you remember Sheikh Hamsa?" Colabuno asks. Sure, sure, the men nod. The popular imam was killed more than a year ago by insurgents, but they're a bit surprised that Colabuno knows who he is. Most of the US troops here have been in town for just a few months. "Well, Sheikh Hamsa told me that weak faith protects only so much.'" The ringleader stares down at the ground and fingers his beads. Colabuno has hit a nerve. "You know, I looked in the Koran. I didn't see anything about Mohammed demanding a better salary before he'd do God's work," Colabuno says, jamming his forefinger into his palm.
A skinny man at the back of the pack speaks up, telling Colabuno that the Americans are just here to take Iraq's oil. "Yeah, you're right. We want your oil," Colabuno answers. Again eyes grow big with surprise. "We want to buy it. So you can pay for jobs, for water, for electricity. Make you rich." The men chuckle. Everyone shakes hands. Askeri's alligator quota is filled by the next morning.
Colabuno joined the Army because, frankly, it sounded better than his other option: managing a local steakhouse. When his recruiter told him about psyops, Colabuno loved the idea. It sounded like something out of The X-Files. "Does the job involve LSD?" he jokingly asked. It did not. Instead, Colabuno has spent the better part of four years, and all of the past 17 months, getting comfortable with the residents of Fallujah. And now that he has cracked Fallujah's cultural code, the brass is reluctant to let him leave.
We head back to the base. Colabuno's office looks like a dorm room, with mountain bikes hanging on the wall next to posters of Kristin Chenoweth, Vida Guerra, the Denver Broncos cheerleaders, and Corona beer. "Theme of the week," reads a white board, "terrorism causes CANCER… and impotence." Colabuno's early efforts to persuade the population were just as subtle. He shows me a collection of his early posters, tabloid-sized pages laid on a table. Against a flaming background, a terrorist holds a child. The text asks why the parents of Fallujah would let insurgents harm their kids. Wrong move. This is a culture based on shame and honor; now you've just called the parents inadequate. Plus, the piece is just too on the nose, too blatant. The best propaganda is sneaky.
So Colabuno started spoofing the insurgents' posters instead. He put a logo similar to that of the terrorist Islamic Army at the top of a simple black-and-white sheet. "A young boy died while wearing a suicide vest given to him by criminals," one flyer read. "You should remember that whoever makes lies about Allah should reserve his seat in hell." The extremists went nuts – screaming at shopkeepers and locals who posted the flyers, blaming other insurgents for defaming their good names. All the while, Americans watched the action through high-powered surveillance cameras. Consequently the marines knew who to question, and who to capture or kill. "We know where you are and what you are doing," another poster proclaimed. "Who will you trust now?"
American forces here set up a tip line so the locals could report on any insurgents (and get a little reward for their efforts). The extremists responded by blowing up the local cell towers, which Colabuno then turned into another psyops poster criticizing their self-destructive behavior. "Now we've got them making really stupid decisions," he says, grinning. "They communicate by cell phone, too. They can't argue that they're just attacking the foreigners."
General David Petraeus knows all about these mind games. The man in charge of the American military effort in Iraq helped turn soldiers' training from tank-on-tank battles to taking on insurgents. He oversaw the writing of the new counterinsurgency manual that John Nagl worked on. The book counsels officers to reinforce the local economy and politics and build knowledge of the native culture, "an operational code' that is valid for an entire group of people." And the manual blasts the old, network-centric American approach in Iraq. "If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents," it says.
So I get escorted across Baghdad's concrete-ringed International Zone, around the manicured lawns of the Republican Palace, up its marbled stairs, past ambassadors and generals, through a seemingly endless series of gates and checkpoints, and into Petraeus' office. But even this far inside the US war machine, I'm expecting a frontal assault on network-centric warfare.
Instead, he sings me a love song.
"It's definitely here to stay. It's just going to keep getting greater and greater and greater," Petraeus says. I settle on a couch, and he shuts off the air conditioner. "I was a skeptic of network-centric warfare for years," he confesses. But thanks to years of wartime funding, he says, the military now has the ability "to transmit data, full-motion video, still photos, images, information. So you can more effectively determine who the enemy is, find them and kill or capture, and have a sense of what's going on in the area as you do it – where the friendlies are, and which platform you want to bring to bear."
Of course, he adds, he doesn't believe the Rumsfeld-era idea that you can get away with fewer, better-networked troops. Petraeus is the man behind the "surge," after all. Anyone who thinks you don't need massing of troops is living in an "academic world," he says. And Petraeus believes "the most important network is still the one that is between the ears of commanders and staff officers."
Yet he's a believer, just like a whole lot of other Army generals. He supports the $230 billion plan to wire the Army, a gargantuan commitment to network-centric war. "We realized very quickly you could do incredible stuff with this," he says. "It was revolutionary. It was."
I press my hands to my forehead. What about all the cultural understanding, I ask him. What about nation-building? What about your counterinsurgency manual?
"Well," Petraeus says, "it doesn't say that the best weapons don't shoot. It says sometimes the best weapons don't shoot. Sometimes the best weapons do shoot." A war like Iraq is a mix, he adds: In one part of the country, the military is reinforcing the society, building things; in another, it's breaking them – waging "major combat operations" that aren't all that different from what might have gone down in 2003. And this technology, he says, it's pretty good at 2003-style war.
When Cebrowski and Garstka wrote about adding information technology to the military's way of finding and wiping out enemies – the kill chain – to a certain extent, they were right. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm began with a long bombing campaign, then a ground assault. But in Afghanistan and the 2003 Iraq war, soldiers on the ground handed off coordinates to bombers and fighter planes, who attacked with laser- and satellite-guided munitions. The effect was devastating, shrinking the so-called sensor-to-shooter cycle to mere instants. During the first Gulf War, it typically took three days of paper pushing to assign a plane a target to hit. This time around, in parts of Anbar province, it took under 10 minutes. A relatively small number of Special Forces, sent to neuter Scud missile sites, took control of an area about the size of South Carolina – despite being outnumbered on the ground at least 10 to 1, and in some spots 500 to 1. The Iraqis never got off a single Scud.
But for all that, Cebrowski and Garstka weren't really writing about network-centric warfare at all. They were writing about a single, network-enabled process: killing. In 1998, to a former fighter jock and missile defender, the two things must have seemed the same. A decade later, it's pretty clear they aren't – not with American troops nation-building in Afghanistan, peacekeeping in Kosovo, chasing pirates off Djibouti, delivering disaster relief to Indonesia, and fighting insurgents in Iraq.
The fact is, today we rely on our troops to perform all sort of missions that are only loosely connected with traditional combat but are vital to maintaining world security. And it's all happening while the military is becoming less and less likely to exercise its traditional duties of fighting an old-fashioned war. When is that going to happen again? What potential enemy of the US is going to bother amassing, Saddam-style, army tanks and tens of thousands of troops when the insurgent approach obviously works so well? "The real problem with network-centric warfare is that it helps us only destroy. But in the 21st century, that's just a sliver of what we're trying to do," Nagl says. "It solves a problem I don't have – fighting some conventional enemy – and helps only a little with a problem I do have: how to build a society in the face of technology-enabled, super-empowered individuals."
Admiral Arthur Cebrowski died of cancer in 2005. The Office of Force Transformation he headed has been disbanded. John Garstka is still at the Defense Department, working in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Forces Transformation and Resources. It reports to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities, which in turn reports to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense (Policy). I ask Garstka if he'd like to meet up. "Sure," he answers. "The Ritz-Carlton does a nice lunch."
In the Ritz's oak-paneled dining room a few minutes' walk from the Pentagon, Garstka sits with his arms folded across his white button-down shirt and his Defense Department badge. He's not exactly pleased with his new position – the length of his office's name is perhaps inversely proportional to its influence. "I have to be a good soldier," he sighs. But he takes comfort in knowing that network-centric warfare is "past the point of no return." It's been "demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt" – not just in traditional battles, like the invasion of Iraq, but also during so-called stability operations, like the four-plus years since "mission accomplished." (He says he'd like to go to Iraq one day to see it all for himself.)
If network-centric warfare has flaws, he adds, don't blame the concept. The slow-moving Defense Department bureaucracy hasn't worked quickly enough to roll out wired gear for the troops. Insurgents seized on commercial technology quicker than anticipated. And anyway, Garstka says, people have hijacked the term network-centric warfare to mean all sorts of things, from investing in fiber optics to rejiggering an organizational chart, without really understanding what it means.
But by the time Garstka finishes his 8-ounce Angus cheeseburger, he's willing to acknowledge some of the potential gaps in the strategy. "I'm not an expert in stability operations," he admits. Maybe network-centric combat isn't perfectly suited to the wars we're fighting now. And it certainly requires a different skill set than counterinsurgency or nation-building. "Stability operations is like soccer. Major combat operations is like football. So it's almost impossible [for one team] to win both the World Cup and the Super Bowl in the same year," he tells me. "Not when you're playing two different games."
Finally, at the end of our meal, Garstka suggests that the model he helped create will have to change again. "You have to think differently about people," he says. "You have your social networks and technological networks. You need to have both."
So the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are updating the playbook. Technological networks like Wal-Mart's are out. The social network warfare of Nagl, Prior, and Colabuno is in.
The Army has set aside $41 million to build what it calls Human Terrain Teams: 150 social scientists, software geeks, and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year. The first six HTTs are already on the ground. The idea, basically, is to give each commander a set of cultural counselors, the way he has soldiers giving him combat advice.
In western Afghanistan, for instance, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was being targeted by rockets, over and over, from the vicinity of a nearby village. But no one from the unit had bothered to ask the townspeople why. When the Human Terrain Team finally paid a visit, villagers complained that the Taliban was around only because the Americans didn't provide security. And oh, by the way, they really wanted a volleyball net, too. So a net was acquired. Patrols were started. There hasn't been an attack in two months.
At the HTT's suggestions, the brigade also invited the province's head mullah to bless a newly restored mosque on the base. He "was so delighted that he recorded an announcement in Pashto and Dari for radio broadcast denouncing the Taliban," an after-action report noted. In his initial evaluation, the brigade commander credits the HTT with an astonishing 60 to 70 percent drop in the number of bombs-and-bullets strikes he has had to make. It's a number that even some HTT members have a hard time believing. But the commander insists that 53 of 83 districts in his area now support the local government. Before the HTT arrived, it was only 19.
"We got trapped into thinking that killing/destruction mechanisms of the highest technical quality could replace true human understanding. The vote is in, and we were wrong," says Steve Fondacaro, a cleft-chinned, chipped-toothed former Special Forces operator who now heads the HTT program. "We had been trying to take the test without doing the course work. That never works in school, and it hasn't worked any better in war."
The program is still new, and many questions remain about how it'll actually operate. Will the social scientists – many of them civilian academics – carry guns? Wear uniforms? Will they be conducting fieldwork or just doing research at their desks? How will these people be trained? What kind of credentials do they need? Will commanders listen to what they have to say? And is it even ethical to use their skills in wartime?
One thing is clear: The Human Terrain Teams will eventually do more than just advise. Soon each team will get a server, a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish, and software for social-network analysis – to diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will mark key cultural and political events. Mapmaking programs will plot out the economic, ethnic, and tribal landscape, just like the command post of the future maps the physical terrain. But those HTT diagrams can never be more than approximations, converting messy analog narratives to binary facts. Warfare will continue to center around networks. But some networks will be social, linking not computers and drones and Humvees but tribes, sects, political parties, even entire cultures. In the end, everything else is just data.
Contributing editor Noah Shachtman wrote about Darpa's research into human enhancement in issue 15.03. To read his Iraq diary and see photos from his trip, see the Wired News blog Danger Room, which won the Online Journalism Association's 2007 award for beat reporting.
Source: http://www.wired.com/print/politics/security/magazine/15-12/ff_futurewar


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Paper that makes the argument for the reform of the 1933 Children and Young Persons Act.
Strategy that has a particular focus on social work in the Health and Social Care (HSC) System which is where the majority of social workers are employed. It is intended as a guide for social workers, their employers, commissioners, education providers and regulators.
Criminal justice, education, youth justice, voluntary and private organisations are also important employers of social workers and this strategy and its proposals will support social workers in these sectors.
Document that explains why preventing physical abuse in high risk families is a key focus of the NSPCC's efforts to keep children safe from harm.
As part of the NSPCC's strategy to improve outcomes for those children who are most at risk, it will be delivering innovative services that seek to capture learning about what works to keep looked after children safe from harm.
This web resource provides information on the looked after children, why looked after children are at risk, safeguarding concerns, as well as further resources, news and statistics.
Guide that aims to identify the issues that commonly lead to safeguarding referrals from care homes. The underlying causes are also identified; neither are in order of prevalence.
Prevention checklists are provided to help both commissioners and providers to work towards a reduction in occurrence of these issues. There are additional links to resources.
Guide that aims to support NHS and local authority commissioners of care homes to ensure that safeguarding is central to the commissioning process and a primary concern for residential and nursing care home providers.
Report that provides details of how safeguarding practices have been improved in the areas of leadership and management; recruiting, maintaining and retaining a highly competent workforce; quality assurance and performance management; referral and assessment processes and procedures; and partnership working.
It gives localised accounts of practice implementation and, where possible, evidence of outcomes.
Report on a series of seminars set-up to draw together national and international knowledge and professional, policy and research expertise in relation to the management, evaluation and research of everyday multi-professional intervention to safeguard children.
The series has resulted in fostering new links between different fields and networks in pursuit of improving data collection and use, in addition to widening opportunities for future collaborative research and development activities.
This systematic literature review of Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) arises from the second Serious Case Review (SCR) of the death of Peter Connelly (Haringey Local Safeguarding Children Board, 2009), in whose case SFBT was being partially used within children's social care services.
The Peter Connelly SCR Overview Report included the recommendation to examine whether any models of practice had an influence on the way in which Peter's case was managed.
Document that explores the issues around what makes accommodation safe for child victims of trafficking. ECPAT UK undertook structured face-to-face interviews and a roundtable discussion with a range of professionals, including local authority children's services, the police, NGOs and organisations accommodating child victims of trafficking, as well as ascertaining the views of the young people themselves. This led to the formulation of 10 child-centred principles concerning the provision of safe accommodation for child victims and/or suspected child victims of trafficking.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
I had this in warm vanilla. It is a light moisturizer. It's easy to apply and soothe out. Not crazy about the Warm Vanilla scent though. No shimmer
Got this on sale for $5. Score! it is a really nice, light lotion that absorbs quickly and is good if you don't need much moisture. I find that it is a little too light to use as a hand moisturizer - a couple hours later, I find myself needing lotion again. I think it would work much better as a daily body moisturizer. Unscented, and designed for sensitive skin.


text:
EA has released a multiplayer trailer for Need for Speed: Most Wanted.
"Witness Need For Speed like you've never seen it before in fast and fun 12-person multiplayer action," the publisher says. "Jump into the open world of Fairhaven City and prove your driving skills against your friends.
"Drive a huge variety of cars and compete in a series of action-packed challenges. Race, drift, jump and take down your friends in a battle to become Most Wanted."
EA has confirmed a Need for Speed Most Wanted release date of October 30 in the US and November 1 in Europe. The Criterion developed open-world racer will be available on Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Vita, iOS and Android.


text:
Updated on
June 25, 2010,
asks from
Chicago, IL
June 24, 2010
Finger Burn
my 1 year old burned his finger on the curlers what do i do im going crazy
More Answers
D.W. answers from Indianapolis on June 24, 2010
I agree with many different pieces of advice.
Use cool water to help prevent further burning. Don't use lotions or anything that will act as a barrier for the heat to escape the skin.
Call the pediatrician and see what they recommend. It's really hard to tell what level of burn it may be. But, a lot can be told by how he's reacting. I used to nanny for a girl who put her hand on the grill while her dad was cooking (she was 2) and got a nasty burn. She went to the ER but was well enough to play the next day.
Still, have medically trained eyes/ears help you know what to do next.
2 moms found this helpful
C.P. answers from Columbia on June 24, 2010
Calm down. If you are freaking out, your child will freak out.
First, run it under cold water. Let the water keep running over it for several minutes. DO NOT USE ICE WATER as this can further damage the skin.
Next, gently dry it off and have a look at it. Edit your message and tell us how big it is, where it is, is it blistered, is it open or oozing, and any other details you can give. I can tell you what is needed with that information. DO NOT PUT ANY KIND OF GREASE OR NEOSPORIN ON THE BURN UNTIL IT IS FULLY ASSESSED. If you have an open (3rd degree) burn you need to seek professional medical attention. If you do have an open wound, use sterile gauze soaked in water or a peice of saran wrap to cover the wound on the trip to the ER.
If it is very large, say covering the whole finger or more, CALMLY pack up a bag with the baby necessities, call your pediatrician and see if they suggest that you take your baby to the ER
1 mom found this helpful
B.A. answers from Chicago on June 25, 2010
If it's just red put ice in a baggie wrap in wash cloth hold while giving hugs, blistering, the same but keep it very clean and watch for infection, purple, blistering, char call dr or go to ER. Watch for signs of infection...swelling, inflammation, fever, streaks moving up the arm, pus-go to doctor.whenever in doubt call your doctor, they may wish wo see them even if it's small.
S.H. answers from Honolulu on June 24, 2010
Take him to the Doctor.... they need to assess how bad the burn is.
If burned badly, even putting ice on it can damage the skin/burn.
maybe cold water at most.
Here's a link on what you can do:
B.M. answers from Chicago on June 25, 2010
I usually have a sun burn spray that relieves pain on contact. I usually give this only on a 1st degree burn. 2nd degree burns, don't pop the blister, and I usually run it over cold water and then use the spray.
I had my son run into a charcoal grill once when he was 3. The doctor once told us not worry unless the burn is 30% of his body. Plus, I doubt burning the finger on the curling iron would give you a 3rd degree burn. 3rd degree burns are from chemical or electrical burns. I'm a chemist, I have seen 3rd degree burns.
D.S. answers from Tulsa on June 24, 2010
mustard takes the sting out. I personall pop any blisters with a needle and drain the fluid out of them cause it hurts when the blisters pop any other way this way it doesn't. your call on that I don't know it would be advisable but I have always done my blisters that way.
H.B. answers from Chicago on June 24, 2010
Cold water right away. Let it rest and then put cold water on again. Something like 15 minutes on and 15 minutes off. I just burnt mine a couple weeks ago and it helped. I tried putting stuff on it, but it didn't help. I actually heard that you're not supposed to put things on it, the skin is trying to heal. Best of Luck
H.P. answers from Boise on June 24, 2010
my son burnt his fingers on the stove and i just ran them under cold water and left it alone and in a few days it was gone let the blisters pop on their own and he will be fine i went crazy too but its not as bad as it seems


text:
Defence spending under fire
PUBLISHED: 05 Sep 2013 00:30:41 | UPDATED: 05 Sep 2013 00:30:41PUBLISHED: 05 Sep 2013 PRINT EDITION: 05 Sep 2013Blackhawks take to the air over Melbourne – but defence spending is set to be earth bound, post election. Photo: Jason South
Geoff Barker
Australia's army, navy and air force and associated industries face an austere and uncertain future whoever wins Saturday's federal election.
The main reasons are obvious. First, the cooling China boom is limiting government budget revenues; second, there are no imminent military threats to the nation; and third, long Australian military deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, East Timor and the Solomon Islands are ending.
Moreover, campaigning politicians know that spending on health, education, aged and disability care, and parental leave are far more popular than defence spending. They also know taxation increases are political poison. So it is hardly surprising defence and national security were hardly mentioned during the election campaign.
Indeed, defence issues would have gone unheralded if not for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's panicky eleventh-hour bids to protect marginal seats with his airy promises to shift the Garden Island naval base to Queensland and to bring forward the construction in Victoria of two new navy supply ships.
Yet more than 21,000 civilian defence jobs will be among the public service jobs facing possible reductions to help a Labor or Coalition government return to a federal budget surplus.
Australia's defence industries – about 3000 small to medium enterprises employing about 15,000 people – are worried by Labor's failure to produce a new pre-election Defence Capability Plan and a new defence industry statement to give greater certainty in plans for investment and tendering.
They fear delays or cancellation of defence projects by any incoming government. Both the SMEs and the eight mostly foreign-owned prime contractors, also fear defence industry job losses, already starting, will erode skills vital to maintaining Australia's regional defence capability edge.
Job axe will fall on salaries
Defence cannot avoid the jobs axe. Salaries now consume 42 per cent (or $10.7 billion) of the $25.4 billion defence budget, said Dr Mark Thomson, defence budget analyst for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. (It used to be around 33 per cent – equal with procurement and operating costs.)
The latest defence white paper summed up the defence dilemma: "Defence will . . . face complex choices over time about the balance of defence budget investment between our current force's preparedness, posture and operations and the future force's capabilities". In his 2013-2014 review of the defence budget, Dr Thomson wrote that "defence spending is at the mercy of the uncertain health of the government's finances".
Professor Paul Dibb, Australia's pre-eminent defence analyst, sees strong parallels between defence's current circumstances and the post-Vietnam era. In both periods, Australian troops were returning from long deployments; in both periods, defence strategy was changing; in both periods, projected increases in real defence spending growth were severely pruned. Dibb sees defence facing "an age of austerity" similar to the post-Vietnam years.
Civilians under fire
With the uniformed Australian Defence Force and equipment purchases extremely difficult to cut, the primary focus for savings has to fall on the civilian workforce after years of strong growth. Some defence budget experts say an incoming government should also review the top-heavy defence civilian and military rank structure which gives some senior bureaucrats and officers salaries that bear little relation to their responsibilities.
An incoming Coalition government would look particularly closely at the 7000-strong work, civilian and military force, the Defence Materiel Organisation which acquires and sustains defence equipment and has a $9.6 billion budget. Some senior DMO figures fear up to 1000 jobs might be shed.
The over-arching political reality facing defence is that Australia is a safe nation despite uncertainties over future US-China relations and some generally low-level maritime provocations by China in mainly north Asian waters.
Moreover, Australian troops are coming home after long, expensive and dangerous deployments. The multi-billion dollar program to acquire new fighter jets, submarines, surface ships and army equipment is starting to take shape. The new defence white paper in May outlined a new maritime strategic policy with primary emphasis on the defence of Australia and its interests.
In fact, only 2 per cent of voters tell pollsters national security is the most important issue facing Australia and there is substantial bipartisanship between the two main parties on most defence issues, including even asylum-seeker policy which is largely managed by defence.
All quiet on the political front
So it is hardly surprising defence and national security have not been prominent in the election campaign. Defence spending now represents a low 1.57 per cent of GDP and neither Labor nor the Coalition is inclined to increase it soon. Both speak airily about increasing defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP at some future, indeterminate date.
Already defence has instituted something close to a civilian hiring freeze but senior defence executives hope most of the spending cuts can be achieved through attrition, not redundancies.
A senior defence official told the AFR "Money is tight. There is no more wiggle-room".
This state of affairs is troubling Australian defence industries. Both prime contractors and sub-contractors on whom defence relies for acquisitions and sustainment, are concerned by slow and uncertain decision making and by the prospect of financially strapped governments delaying or cancelling defence projects.
Out of the Valley of Death
Their concerns recently prompted the Australian Industry Group defence council to appeal to both parties in a pre-election statement. The AIG called for the government, through its Defence Capability Plan, to ensure certainty in plans for equipment acquisitions and sustainment. It also sought assurances of continuity in naval shipbuilding to avoid so-called "valley of death" construction lags, and it supported the government commitment to build 12 new submarines in Australia in what will be a record $36 billion to $40 billion program.
Yet the Labor government failed to deliver on a pledge by Defence Minister Stephen Smith to publish a new DCP before the end of the 2013-2014 financial year. And the Minister for Defence Materiel, Dr Mike Kelly, failed to produce a new statement of government defence industry policy before the government went into caretaker mode. These were presumably not sufficiently important to rush out pre-election.
From an industry perspective, the DCP is the key document for defence contractors because it is a guide to planned and approved purchases with indicative budgets and schedules. But it is highly ambitious and is regularly updated and modified, and many large and small defence firms would prefer what they have described as a more modest DCP with greater certainty.
What of industry-military links
The link between defence and industry has been the subject of a raft of reports over many years from Labor and Coalition governments. It was addressed in general terms in this year's white paper which offered little more than familiar platitudes about cooperation, competitiveness and capability. Both Kelly and Johnson appear clueless on the issue, although Kelly issued a statement saying Labor defence industry policy centred on enhancing innovation, building competitiveness and developing skills. All true. But easier to say than to do.
Within defence there is intense speculation on who will replace Stephen Smith as defence minister. The reported front-runner for Labor is the present Minister for Defence Materiel, Dr Mike Kelly, a moustachioed former military officer and lawyer. Under a Coalition government, the job would presumably go to the present shadow minister, Senator David Johnston (WA), also a lawyer.
Neither man is highly regarded in the defence hierarchy. Both would have to convince defence they possess the personal and professional insight needed to run the vast, complex and deeply tribal organisation. Post-election, there will uncertainty while Kelly or Johnston establish their authority and their leadership.
The Australian Financial Review
Read more
People | Kevin Rudd, Stephen Smith, Mike Kelly, David Johnston |
Topics | Defence, Politics /World Politics , Politics /Federal Politics |


text:
89.3% of Users Would Recommend this Digital Camera
10.7% of Users Would Not Recommend this Digital Camera
PROS: easy to use, good screen, quality
CONS: screens gets messed up, things fall apart, wheel is always loose, switches mode whenever unexpected
PROS: user friendly
CONS: overpriced for the quality
PROS: Takes some superb shots and many good shots
CONS: Also takes blurry shots in bad lighting and with shaky hands
PROS: $100 cheaper than most other pocket-sized 5MPs Wife loves it Big LCD screen looks great Plenty of manual controls for an average user. Picture quality looks great.
CONS: Doesn't come with a case. Comes with only 32MB media stick.
PROS: Big screen, cool features, size not too small but small enough, ease of use
CONS: Photo software is just blah.
PROS: 5MP, pocket friendly, use 2 AA batteries, very fast, well built.
CONS: limited selections of movie resolution (640 or 160). In Canon, you can pick 320.
PROS: 5MP's in a nice small package. All the features you need..don't pay for things you will never use. Manual functions are best left for SLR's. Point and shoot is a snap. Massive 2.5" screen makes viewing pictures a pleasure. Uses included rechargable batteries plus standard alkaline AA's in a pinch. Don't need to invest in another rechargable and never get acught short (huge plus in my book!) Photo qulaity exceptional, will make the DSC-V1 obsolete. I was waiting for a high quality camera, with a big screen and the right battery capability.
CONS: No Case....that's it!!!!!
PROS: Pocket sized camera, very easy to use, photos turn out very well; great to frame your shots and to review them w/2.5" LCD Screen. Shot to shot very quick, trimming of photos simple. Best all around camera I've ever owned. Can use 1 wide angle lens, and two telephoto lenses. Long battery life; 2545 Mh batteries coming soon. Easy x-fer photos from camera to computer.
CONS: Would like to have audio for single photos to describe photo scene.
PROS: Great compact size, lots of feature and a very easy to see lcd screen. Camera is light and the quality is excellent.
CONS: It takes about 12 pics with the included 32 mb memory stick, the 2 rechargeable batteries need a full 6 hours for recharge. If you don't mind buying a higher capacity memory stick and some spare batteries, this would be a excellent camera.
PROS: This ultra-compact camera produces excellent results, boots up instantly, great battery life, and most notable advantage: vivid 2.5" LCD screen
CONS: Poor bundled software
Rate the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 20.2 MP Digital Camera - Black
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