Elizabeth A. Stanley-Mitchell and Edmond A Walsh report on the pros and cons of US Army Battlefield Digitisation.
The contemporary revolution in military affairs (RMA) promises quantum leaps in the war-fighting capabilities of US armed forces. Given such high potential rewards, each service has made an attempt to harness these new technologies. The army is no exception, its efforts are known collectively as the Army Transformation. Digitisation promises to use modern IT to create a common view of the battlefield for all forces at all command levels. By minimising the fog of war, the technology should lead to increased lethality, survivability and operating tempo for a digital force.
Since the 70s, the army has attempted to incorporate RMA technologies into its war-fighting capability. US Army digitisation has concentrated on heavy, mechanised forces. Light and medium weight forces have not been as involved with army digitisation efforts, although some units participated in a joint exercise in which digital equipment was tested in an urban environment.
Technology’s double-edged sword
Scholars generally concur that at the operational level of warfare, RMA technologies provide three major improvements in capability: precision strikes, increased velocity, and information dominance. First, precision strikes allow the military to conduct operations at a distance from the enemy and to reduce the casualties and collateral damage associated with combat operations. Second, increased velocity will create pre-emptive warfare between cohesive, fast-moving friendly forces and unready, disrupted enemy forces by allowing battlefield leaders to use their enhanced knowledge to eliminate irrelevant and counterproductive movement.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, information dominance promises to erode or destroy enemy means of collecting, processing, storing and disseminating information. Military theorists believe information dominance will enhance situational awareness by providing accurate, complete, real-time information about friendly and enemy forces and the surrounding environment.
The sword’s edge of opportunity Digitisation could create three jurisdictional opportunities for the army. First, the real time sensor-to-shooter architecture associated with digitisation may eliminate the need for some command echelons and increase top-down command centralisation. Second, this architecture may allow the army to expand its jurisdiction deeper into the battlespace through precision strikes. Third, digitisation may realign jurisdictions between the army’s active and reserve components, perhaps with the active component becoming the army’s digital force and the reserves shouldering humanitarian and peacekeeping missions. However, many of these opportunities have unintended consequences or obstacles to their success.
Eliminating echelons
Digitisation and its resulting dominant battlefield awareness create potential synergies that could have implications for the army’s organisational structure. As in business, the real-time information link among echelons and between sensors and shooters makes it possible to flatten the army’s hierarchy by eliminating some command echelons. And because IT enhances the ability to re-allocate combined arms assets quickly and flexibly, it may not be necessary to have all capabilities at every echelon. Finally, the link between sensors and shooters may eliminate traditional distinctions between operations and intelligence.
Digital technologies adopted by the army can cause top-down centralisation in two ways. First, although in theory everyone has the same digital picture of the battlefield at the same time, lower echelons cannot see the whole battlefield as well as higher echelons. This results from the size of computer screens in tanks, Bradleys and Land Warrior headgear sets. Screens in individual weapons platforms are smaller than in command vehicles, showing only a small portion of the battlefield at a time. Even if they wanted to scroll around and discern the bigger picture, soldiers in these platforms and dismounted soldiers, have less time to interface with their screens than commanders and staff officers. As a result, higher echelon commanders have a better picture of the digital battlefield than their subordinates and may choose to interfere to take advantage of the initiative such information provides. In short, on the digital battlefield, the best place to see the battle may be from within the command- post vehicle, next to the bubba-vision screens. The result is that commanders who want access to the best information will be tied to their command-and-control (C2) vehicles.
The second effect flows from the first: with a better picture of the battlefield, commanders risk micro-managing subordinates.
Like the air force, where the central figure is the pilot and everyone else is the supporting cast, the digital battlefield risks creating an officer-centralised organisation where the commander sits in his C2 vehicle and moves subordinate puppets around the battlefield.
Re-aligning jurisdictions
The army’s digitisation plans call for its 10 active divisions to be digitised by 2012, but plans for digitising reserve and guard components are uncertain. This is important because impending integrations of National Guard light-infantry companies in active-duty brigades, the formation of two integrated divisions, and the continued existence of separate enhanced brigades, underscore the relevance of reserve-component combat arms units. Digital forces must accommodate the least common-denominator communication systems analog or legacy, non-digital systems. Differences in the way digital and non-digital forces can be employed raise questions about the proper division of jurisdictions between the army’s active and reserve components. From the active component’s perspective, digitisation may be an opportunity to develop digital jurisdiction and give away the peacekeeping and humanitarian jurisdictions to the reserves.
The sword’s edge of competition
Despite the army’s assumption to the contrary, digitisation could degrade decision-making ability among tactical leaders in four ways. First, over-reliance on screens could degrade traditional warfare skills such as navigating and calling for fire that will become rusty as digital equipment automates navigation and target-acquisition processes.
Second, digital technology could create indecisive leaders overwhelmed by data they have not been trained to assimilate. Soldiers could become so dependent on their screens that they lose the ability to infer information from environmental clues. Or, having a digital picture may obscure awareness of other key inputs to decision-making, especially inputs that cannot be measured with electronic sensors in the digital system. In some situations, these other inputs, for example political and environmental conditions, could be more important than screen data. Most importantly, leaders will come to rely on what their screens present, but screens display data not processed information.
Third, a digital picture of the wider battlefield could be harmful from a morale perspective for small unit leaders. This gets at the positive side of the fog of war: what soldiers don’t know can’t hurt them. In the past, without a wide view of the battlefield, soldiers relied on personal information and depended on their buddies in a local fight. In other words, what happens when all the friendly icons in the area get wiped out and the screen is covered with enemy?
Finally, inherent in dependence on a digital picture of the battlefield is the risk that the picture will be taken away. Jamming and hacking could have disastrous consequences for tactical leaders relying on digital technology. The more units rely on IT, the more likely it becomes a target for disruption.
Media threat to information dominance
Much of the promised capability enhancements that will accrue to the digital force presume such a force will possess information dominance, “the degree of information superiority that allows the possessorÉ to achieve operational advantage in a conflict or to control the situation in operations short of war, while denying those capabilities to the enemy.” Yet even as Joint Vision 2020 insists “the joint force must be able to take advantage of superior information converted to superior knowledge to achieve decision superiority”, the information explosion engendered by new technologies may not let any combatant achieve superiority, much less dominance. A major reason is the transformation of the media as it also exploits new technologies. In the past five years, a qualitative advance in civilian communications technologies has occurred, and the ability of the military to maintain a secure information environment during conflict has eroded significantly.
Reliance on civilian contractors
There is no doubt that IT is complex to operate and maintain in the best conditions; the difficulty increases exponentially when such equipment is tactical and taken into the field. Digital battlefield equipment includes computers, radios, satellite terminals, switches and software, all potentially faulty or weak. This new complexity requires a new kind of battlefield professional: the civilian contractor. IT has created a new jurisdiction that makes civilian contractors indispensable on the digital battlefield. The digital army relies on them to train and equip its forces and to keep its digital systems operational.
The wider conflict
The third way that a digital army will increase jurisdictional competition is by focusing its digitisation efforts on heavy units operating in the high end of the conflict spectrum. The digital battlefield, as the army sees it, improves mechanised and armour forces that rely on manoeuvre within traditional parameters of warfare dominating an enemy on the physical battlefield. This definition expands the battlespace in depth, breadth and height, but does not alter its dimension or challenge the kind of conflict one would find there.
Paradoxically, if the army were to digitise according to this vision, it will encourage adversaries to pursue asymmetric warfare strategies. After all, given its digital capabilities, who would want to face an army on an open battlefield? Adversaries may acknowledge US military superiority but will find ways to exploit vulnerabilities in the US firepower-centred way of war. As a result, non-traditional adversaries are evolving that challenge assumptions underpinning the army’s vision of the future battlefield.
Yet the army’s digitisation efforts are not addressing these threats. While the army did test its Land Warrior dismounted-soldier system in a September 2000 joint experiment, Land Warrior remains less developed than digital systems for heavy weapons platforms. For example, Land Warrior weighs over 90lbs, in addition to food, ammunition and other gear that an infantryman carries. And because each Land Warrior system costs $167,000, not all dismounted soldiers will wear them. This could tell the enemy where to strike, presumably at non-digitised soldiers. It is likely that digitising dismounted soldiers creates an easier targeting system for an enemy. For example, sniper weapons are being developed to focus on frequencies transmitted by the Land Warrior system. This makes a sniper’s job easier, the sniper would not have to see a body but merely shoot at a frequency transmission. Yet these second and third-order effects of digitisation on the lower-end of the combat spectrum do not get the same attention as conventional warfare issues. The army should not assume forces using current RMA IT and precision weapons can meet all demands across the conflict spectrum. In short, if there’s a need for military operations at lower levels of the conflict spectrum, and the army is not ready to perform them, other national security professions will fill the void.
As has been shown, IT from the contemporary RMA is a double-edged sword for the US Army’s professional jurisdiction. How the army has chosen to digitise is an expression of its expert knowledge and professional jurisdiction. Army digitisation has focused on heavy forces operating at the high end of the conflict spectrum, yet the professional system of national security encompasses much more than this. Emerging threats suggest conventional warfare in open terrain is not what future warfare is about. By ignoring non-traditional forms of warfare and the potential professional competitors that such warfare will bring, the army risks being caught unaware and disregarded.
Elizabeth A. Stanley-Mitchell, Center for Peace and Security Studies. Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
Digitisation will give the US Army greater opportunities to control the battlefield but there are potential downsides still to be evaluated
Digital technology could overwhelm leaders with data they have not been trained to assimilate
