Enlightened Librarian: Plugged-in war

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Plugged-in war · Oct 12, 01:05 PM

MIT’s Technology Review has a compelling article on transformation in the U.S. military, involving increasingly sophisticated information systems and growing dependence on networked communication. “The basic notion behind military transformation is that information technologies allow you to substitute information for mass,” says one observer, meaning that to increase coordination, responsiveness and automation in battle is to allow decreased dependence on thick metal to stop bullets and shells. The article allows a fascinating glimpse into the U.S. military technocracy, whose vision is of human soldiers as “nodes” in a vast shell of networked intelligence. But, as the article points out, real warfare is still far from the videogame ideal—a system failure at a key juncture in the invasion of Iraq resulted in all the unpredictabilities of old-fashioned offline fighting. Yet the American military is dead-set on the transformation of its forces through information technology, a move that, like missile defence, involves a complex intertwining of government and industry. One of the article’s related links outlines Boeing’s conceptualization of a Future Combat System in an acronym-heavy series of powerpoint slides crammed with robotic drones and soldiers fighting wars from a computer screen. One is left with the impression of an overwhelming desire for the flow of American dollars to staunch the flow of American soldiers’ blood.

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