Idiosyntactix Strategic Arts and Sciences Alliance The Brand Name of the Media Revolution

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Information Technology Impacts on the Warfighter

Information Technology Impacts on the Warfighter

Impacts on the Warfighter

Information technologies, for the purposes of this analysis, include collection, processing, display, and communications technologies. Processing technologies include data fusion and analysis as well as support for decision making, such as knowledge-based expert systems.

Advances in these technologies have resulted in an enormous amount of near real-time information being potentially available to individuals anywhere at anytime. The "intelligence" level of systems and our confidence in their ability has also increased dramatically to the point where life and death decisions are now routinely being made automatically by computers, albeit with some degree of human supervision.

Even at this early point in the information age, the battlefield is awash with vastly increased amounts and improved quality of information. The dynamics of information dissemination have changed considerably in the latter half of this century, from flowing primarily through command structures to the point where significant amounts of information are obtained outside of the command hierarchy. Thus, what was once a predominantly highly constrained and vertical information flow has evolved into a mix of vertical and horizontal flows. Naturally, the amount, quality, and dynamics of information dissemination have begun to impact the ways decisions are allocated (delegation) and the manner in which those decisions are made.

Thus (as shown in Figure 1), advances in information technologies provide us with significant opportunities both to improve our ability to command and control our forces and to add to and/or improve our force capabilities.

Our information-related vulnerabilities have also increased. Increased reliance on high-tech systems for information collection, interpretation, processing, analysis, communication, and display has made failures in these systems more disruptive. The ubiquitous nature of these technologies provides our potential adversaries with capabilities that help them understand how to attack our information assets and give them the tools to do so. Our command and control systems can no longer be evaluated on the basis of measures of merit (MOMs) related solely to the production of quality information in a timely manner. It is now important to consider such attributes as availability, integrity, and authenticity of the information, its ease of use, and its value-added for decision making.

Command and control has long been a recognized force multiplier, and improvements in information technologies offer tremendous opportunities to perfect existing approaches and explore new ones. Quicker, better decisions will allow us to operate more effectively within the enemy's decision cycle, providing us with an opportunity to control engagements. Improvements in information technologies also enhance the capabilities of our weapons, providing them with increased standoff capability and accuracy.

But the opportunities that new and improved weapons and command and control offer cannot be successfully exploited unless we make appropriate changes to our concepts of operations, doctrine, and organizational structures and provide the required personnel education, training, and programs of exercises.

This is not to imply that we must wait for improvements in technology to actually occur before considering new approaches to command and control, concepts of operation, doctrine, or organizational arrangements. Quite the contrary, if we wait, the inertia associated with developing and implementing these changes will permanently keep us behind the technological power curve. Nor does this imply that changes in command and control or force capabilities must necessarily precede alterations to concepts of operation or doctrine.

In reality, these elements (e.g. concept of operations, doctrine, technology, etc.) constitute a package that, taken as a whole, provides real operational capability that can be applied in a specific mission. A mission-specific perspective is important because no organizational structure or approach to command and control is going to be well suited for the range of likely missions, missions as diverse as an MRC and peace-keeping. New MOMs will be required which must also be mission-related. For example, classic measures, such as taking and holding territory, are not relevant in some mission contexts.

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