While the Americans are beginning to realise that the future of war they envisioned is every day increasingly resembling the colonial wars of yesterday, at least in Iraq, theses that take account of cultural factors are slowly taking over from the purely Clausewitzian theories of armed conflict and their avatar, the all-mighty ‘technology does it all’. Network-centric warfare, which was to abolish space and make a break with massive armies, has failed in Afghanistan and Iraq. If wars against terrorism have to be supported by networks, they are not exactly those that the theoreticians of the ‘revolution in military affairs’ had in mind.
Network-Centric Warfare: Technology in Mourning?
Faced with the Afghan, and even more with the Iraqi headache, the American military have finally realised that technological supremacy only gives a marginal advantage in asymmetrical warfare. And it is an advantage that sometimes works as much to the enemy’s benefit as to their own.
The war against terrorism is more a resurgence of past history than the frenzied application of general staff ‘techno-fantasies’, an involuntary reminder of colonial wars in its unconventional character. Science fiction UFOs are gradually vanishing from the strategic concept firmament, to be replaced by much more down-to-earth notions, where networks are social rather than electronic, supported as necessary by technology, and aimed at sustaining a meticulous management of perceptions.
The Improbable Holy Grail of Arthur Cebrowski
In Admiral Cebrowski’s visionary imagination(1), each and every soldier becomes a complete information nodal point, totally autonomous and capable of configuration or reconfiguration as required from a command and control nerve centre sometimes thousands of miles away.
Il reste 93 % de l'article à lire
