The charge of the Byte Brigade

What makes American president George W Bush so smug, confident and cocksure in proclaiming the inevitability of his victory over Iraq is the fact that he knows he has at his disposal the most advanced technology in the world and almost limitless funds to deploy it.

High-tech weaponry has been around for some time now. But the watershed that this US-Iraq war marks is the networking and integration of all components and parameters on the battlefront, with communications capability that enables precise annihilation of enemy targets, often by exercising nothing more than the index finger on the mouse button.

Consider this for starters: A US army Division confronted with a worrisome enemy bastion in the desert—say, a fortress housing enemy troops armed with heavy artillery—need not endanger itself by mindlessly charging forward with guns blazing. Instead, a marine calmly works out the target’s locational coordinates (using his laser viewfinder and Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver). The target can be pinpointed with an accuracy level of within 1 metre. These coordinates are then transmitted via a communications satellite to the US command centre. Officials at the command centre analyse this data along with digital maps and video pictures taken by unmanned Predator drones flying nearby. The officials transmit the coordinates to a high-altitude stealth bomber (such as the B-2) flying over the region, which then drops a smart bomb. As the bomb is dropped, its course can be corrected by information transmitted from the GPS satellite, ensuring a direct hit on the target, smashing it to smithereens and leaving the army Division free to move on unhindered.

What’s awesome about of all of this is that it can be executed in a matter of minutes. In real-time, battle commanders at the command centre are presented with a holistic picture of the battle arena. Data pours in from aerial surveillance aircraft like AWACS, Joint STARS, Predators, Global Hawks and U-2 spy planes, and from “situational awareness” computers installed in tanks and other armoured vehicles, which transmit positional data to the command centre. The commanders survey the battle arena on giant plasma screens, which have replaced the unwieldy maps and charts spread over tables with manually adjustable thumbtacks to represent troop locations and movements. In today’s network-centric warfare, the command centre can flexibly adjust and re-deploy resources as required, based on an assessment of the dynamically changing data streaming in continuously.
All of this would seem to indicate that the US military continues to remain at the cutting edge of technology innovation and R&D.

That may have been true decades ago when military research contributed such amazing inventions like the jet engine, plastics, and even the precursor to the Internet—ARPANET.

But the US military of today has undergone a transformation and is in fact adapting and utilising technology that is widely used in the private sector. US defence spending on equipment and information systems is rapidly rising, but it’s being sourced from a wide variety of private companies, ranging from tiny start-ups like Crossbow (high-tech sensors) to commercial software companies like Oracle (database software).

Dispensing with its traditional philosophy of itself building everything to military-level specifications, and instead purchasing commercial-grade components, the US military has been able to cut costs and yet speed up adoption dramatically. For instance, the GPS receivers being used in Gulf War II are not much different from those becoming available in some commercial cell phones; the Joint STARS aircraft uses Hewlett-Packard servers not unlike those deployed in corporations; and, the supply-chain logistics are managed using WiFi barcode scanners and hand-held devices almost identical to those used by supermarkets and companies like Federal Express. Fact is, “everyday” technology, both hardware and software, is now apparently robust and hardy enough to prove itself on the military battlefield too.

Well, maybe not entirely. There’s no doubt that from an infotech viewpoint, war has become business, as much as business is war these days. But as the US military has discovered to its consternation, information technology still comes with inherent imperfections and pitfalls. The systems are ultimately only as good as the information they receive—the old adage ‘garbage in, garbage out’ still holds; so it was quite incredible to see dismayed military top brass aghast that the enemy they’d “war-gamed” against turned out to be quite different from the real enemy on the ground. Not unlike corporate top management bewildered why all the investment in infotech has not transformed the organisation and wiped out the competition! And it’s all very well to have data flowing in thick and fast, but the resultant information overload can actually have a negative impact on decision-making, if the decision-makers and all others down the line are not sufficiently trained to interpret the data, or the systems are not fully integrated into meaningful MIS or Military/Business Intelligence.

Yes, Gulf War II marks the advent of the networked military, taking its cue from the networked corporation. Just one big difference remains: In the corporate world, hardware and software that doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to has rarely been known to kill friendly business associates or unwitting customers.

Val Souza, Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com