General James Mattis, head of Joint Forces Command, showed once again that despite public perception, the Marines remain the most intellectual branch of the armed forces.
Riffing on John Boyd’s “people first, ideas second, hardware last” mantra yesterday during a recent talk, Gen Mattis questioned the type of system the military has created in which members in the field are unable to make decisions without first running it through higher headquarters via complex communications networks.
Do we rely too much on our technology? Mattis says,
“We must be able to operate when systems go down… It is much more important for officers to get comfortable operating with uncertainty rather than to keep grasping for more certainty.”
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“What are we creating today with our command-and-control systems?” Mattis asked. “I don’t think we have turned off our radios in the last eight years. What kind of systems are we creating where we depend on this connection to headquarters? While we want the most robust communications, we also want to make sure we can operate with none of it.”
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“Mission-type orders rather than bandwidth are the key to the future,” he said. “We need officers who can operate off a commander’s intent, understand what the boss several levels above wants, and carry them out to suffocate the enemy’s hopes.”
Technology is a necessary part of maintaining our strategic competitive advantage, but only when we are its master, not the other way around.
We now have more access to data, communication and information than at any time in history, yet the great superpower finds itself wallowing in two wars against vastly under-resourced opponents like a T. Rex in a tar pit. The U.S. military has developed its technology, but has it lost its ability to think?
The always entertaining William Lind, in a piece for The American Conservative entitled, “Rage Against the Machine” wrote in 2003,
I often lecture to young people, college grads, usually on military topics. They are adept at the information technologies, having imbibed them as their mother’s milk. The problem, to put it bluntly, is that most of them cannot think. They cannot think because of information, not because of a lack of it.
An Amish friend of mine, David Klein, put it well as we talked under the trees of his Wayne County, Ohio, farmyard this past summer. Using information technologies, he said, is like trying to build a car by reaching blindly into a vast dumpster and using as parts whatever comes to hand. That is how these young minds work. They cannot grasp any sort of intellectual order or framework. All they have ever encountered are bits and pieces of this and that, spewed randomly out of some cosmic, universal vending machine. It is not simply that things do not make sense; these young people have no concept of things making sense. As Ortega warned would happen, they have become technologically competent barbarians.
Again, an earlier generation of conservatives would have understood. When life is, in effect, an endless process of interruption, thought, as we traditionally knew it, becomes impossible. Western thought is linear, but “information” is chaotic. More, thought requires being alone with your thoughts, something the technologically dependent can neither attain nor abide.
War will always be a contest of minds – technology is useful, but it is a tool, not the strategy – do you hear me Air Force?
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I know I am a little late on this one, but I wanted to pipe up. I think this is the epidemic of our generation, not just the military and not just the Air Force.
The common sense of the people is that you have to only do well in science and math, and then you will go to a college where they teach you to be even more technically inclined, in order to get a job that requires constant interaction with devices, never really utilizing your “education” but people keep telling you that it is a “good job.”
It is as if people have forgotten that the ability to think is what education is supposed to be all about. No one is taught to think anymore. And heaven help the ones that actually do think.