Blessing or a Curse?

By John

I can't figure out if this piece is on the rise or the fall of net-centric warfare. Maybe technology is moving the military horizontally?

The finicky, incompatible equipment that’s given to the infantrymen and tank drivers in Charlie Company—the guys who are spending this cold, wet February night on the front—is primitive in comparison with the gear at the sprawling military base outside of Balad, where battalion-level commanders oversee the 300 troops in Charlie and three other companies. There, things are beginning to work like the network-centric theorists predicted, with drone video feeds and sensor data and situation reports flying in constantly. But to the guys in Charlie Company, this technological wizardry and the Pentagon’s futuristic hypotheses seem awfully far away.
There is a simple, but significant, reason why: Bringing frontline infantrymen into the network isn’t as easy as wiring up a headquarters. Battlefield gear has to be wireless, durable, secure, and completely effortless to use in the chaos of combat. The network is slowly expanding to meet the grunts. But the Department of Defense’s lumbering process for buying new equipment still virtually ensures that ground-level soldiers won’t be linked-in until early next decade. “The fog, friction and uncertainty of war are still there, same as always,” says retired Marine Col. T.X. Hammes, considered one of the leading authorities on counterinsurgency. “This net-centricity helps some, but it only goes as far as the battalion [the command echelon above the companies that do the actual fighting]. After that, these guys are on their own.”

Read the whole thing.

May 22, 2006 01:27 PM Tech

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Introduction Noah Schachtman of DefenseTech is always a persistent source of great information regarding the technology and equipment that is used in today’s battlefields. (Via Op-For) In PopularSciences, Schachtman and David Axe write on R... [Read More]

Comments

Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth then we add weight. Deciding between beans, bullets hydration or netcentric equipment. Oh, as far as weight goes don't forget we need to asccomomdate the femininsts/female soldiers. How far down the chain can we go with today's technology? I can say this the USMC have been WAY AHEAD of the US Army efforts for years. No I'm not a Jarhead.

For me and many of the users the biggest problem is filtering the data to get the information needed for your job.

CoREv · May 22, 2006 05:18 PM