ABSTRACT
No military forces ever have placed such faith in intelligence as do US military forces today. The idea of a ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA) assumes that information and the ‘information age’ will transform the knowledge available to armed forces, and thus the nature of war. This faith is central to US doctrine and policy. Joint Visions 2010 and 2020, which guide strategic policy, predict forces with ‘dominant battlespace awareness’, and a ‘frictional imbalance’ and ‘decision superiority’ over any enemy. The aim is unprecedented flexibility of command: the ability to combine freedom for units with power for the top, and to pursue ‘parallel, not sequential planning and real-time, not prearranged, decision making’.1 Officials have created new concepts about intelligence and command. They hope to pursue power by using new forms of information technology in order to fuse into systems matters which once were split into ‘stovepipes’. These concepts include netcentric warfare (NCW), the idea that armed forces will adopt flat structures, working in nets on the internet, with soldiers at the sharp end able to turn data processing systems at home into staffs through ‘reachback’, real time, immediate and thorough inter-communication; C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; loosely speaking, how armed forces gather, interpret and act on information); the ‘infosphere’, the body of information surrounding any event; and ‘IO’ (Information Operations), the actions of secret agencies. The aim is to realise the RMA, by creating a revolution in military intelligence. This paper will consider how far those ideas can be achieved, and how attempts to do so will affect the nature of power, intelligence and war in the twenty-first century. Progressives and revolutionaries debate the details of these issues (conservatives need not apply). The Marine Corps’ draft doctrine on IO denies that technology can solve all problems and defends its ‘timeless fighting principles’. Army doctrine too gives C4ISR a Clausewitzian cast, judging that it can ‘reduce the friction caused by the fog of war’ and help impose one’s will on the enemy. But it also concludes that ‘achieving accurate situational understanding depends at least as much on human judgment
as on machine-processed information – particularly when assessing enemy intent and combat power . . . [U]ncertainty and risk are inherent in all military operations.’2 But these judgements represent the cautious end of the spectrum of US military thinking about the future of warfare. Revolutionaries, conversely, assume C4ISR will function in a system precisely as a person sees the world, turns data to knowledge and acts on it. Enthusiasts believe armed forces can comprehend an enemy and a battle perfectly, and act without friction. David Alperts, a leading Pentagon figure in NCW, holds that
we will effectively move from a situation in which we are preoccupied with reducing the fog of war to the extent possible and with designing approaches needed to accommodate any residual fog that exists to a situation in which we are preoccupied with optimizing a response to a particular situation . . . we will move from a situation in which decision making takes place under ‘uncertainty’ or in the presence of incomplete and erroneously [sic] information, to a situation in which decisions are made with near ‘perfect’ information.3
