The IED struggle has become a test of national agility for a lumbering military-industrial complex fashioned during the Cold War to confront an even more lumbering Soviet system. "If we ever want to kneecap al-Qaeda, just get them to adopt our procurement system. It will bring them to their knees within a week," a former Pentagon official said.
"The Empires of the Future are the Empires of the Mind" is more than a cool header for our blog. It means something to me, in that I believe that world of the future will quite literally be shaped by those most at home with communicating and using the infosphere to their advantage. Individual Americans (including, i might add, our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines in the field) are increasingly at home in this environment. Unfortunately at operational, strategic, and political military levels of war, our government is increasingly out of its league. Enormous time and effort is spent formatting, controlling, labeling, copying, and filing information. Much, much less is spent on actually creating and sharing it. Increasingly, our industrial-age information sharing structures are breaking down, and it is playing severe havoc with our ability to create themes and to shape the environment. It's a theme to which I will return in future posts. If our government cannot adapt to the future international environment, how free peoples create their own information-age modes of organization to attend to their security needs? Western polities unleashed as 4th generation warfare actors will be formidable indeed.
2 comments:
I think there's no question that we have the technology to share information, I think the problem now is the process. This point speaks to the need of some type of Goldwater-Nichols type reform to mandate formalizing inter-agency cooperation, funding and information sharing. Without such reform, I believe we'll continue with disjointed, disconnected information sharing procedures/processes that hamstrung us prior to 9/11. In a world where more than the equivalent of all the data in the Library of Congress hurls around the world in one second, failure to account for this will leave us at the strategic disadvantage that Hawkeye envisions.
The government will not only have to adapt to the demands of the international environment; but it will also have to adapt to the demands of our own changing domestic paradigm of productivity. We are now entering a distinctly post-Industrial Age, very different from the Industrial Age that we are leaving behind (and not the same as the "Information Age"). Our civilian work force, and our warfighters, are used to, and their perceptions and skills are optimized for, a different paradigm of interaction, productivity, and combat effectiveness. Not only are Industrial Age practices losing their effectiveness; but failure to adopt appropriate Post-Industrial Age practices entail very high opportunity costs.
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