La guerra del futuro no será cybernética.

La incertidumbre ha sido siempre un componente esencial de la guerra. Y lo seguirá siendo. Pero, ciertos expertos han creido, recurrentemente, que su eliminación estaba supeditada a la adquisición de las nuevas tecnologías por venir. La "network centric warfare" no escapa a esta intención.

Over the Horizon: The Persistent Temptation of Network-Centric Warfare

By Robert Farley | 21 Sep 2011

Ten years ago, the concept of "network-centric warfare" dominated U.S. military thinking and deployment. An outgrowth of work associated with the Revolution in Military Affairs, network-centric warfare envisioned a battle space in which information dominance and standoff killing power gave the U.S. military supremacy across the combat spectrum. Influential in doctrine and acquisitions, network-centric warfare offered the tempting promise of eliminating Carl von Clausewitz' fog of war, making the battlefield legible and, for well-prepared U.S. forces, malleable. Platforms such as the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship and DDG-1000, the Army's Future Combat System, and the F-35 multirole combat aircraft were envisioned to play key roles in a "system of systems" capable of taking apart and rendering inert an enemy military organization. In one sense, network-centric warfare represented a remarkably optimistic vision of what a well-structured, well-oiled government bureaucracy might do when given the appropriate tools. Knowledge, in the right hands and going in the right direction, literally meant power.

Perhaps inevitably, problems emerged when that vision met reality. Although the U.S. military quickly disassembled Saddam Hussein's army in 2003, it had great difficulty with the insurgency that followed. The battle space in post-invasion Iraq, made up in large part of human beings, proved troublingly opaque. In many cases, too much information proved as problematic as not enough. Network-centric warfare didn't exactly fail, but most now recognize that it conceived of information dominance in overly simplistic terms, especially in the context of wars against substate actors, like insurgents or terrorist organizations.

Adam Elkus situates network-centric warfare, and the related concept of "effects-based operations," within a family of military doctrines seeking to cause "strategic paralysis." Doctrines of strategic paralysis envision leveraging minimal force into catastrophic effect by directly targeting the enemy's center of gravity. As Elkus and others have suggested, the quest for strategic paralysis emerged from the stalemate in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I. Both sides, but particularly the Allies, sought technological and doctrinal "fixes" that could win the war -- and future wars -- quickly, decisively and at low cost. The work of early airpower theorists, who argued that strategic bombing could induce the collapse of enemy governments without the  destruction of enemy armies, represent an early and well-known example of strategic paralysis advocates. Writers such as Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell believed that they could calculate with precision the amount of ordnance necessary to make society descend into chaos, as well as the exact factories that needed to be destroyed to cause a modern industrial economy to grind to a halt.

Indeed, the quest for strategic paralysis led observers such as B.H. Liddell Hart to misinterpret the German "Blitzkrieg" of World War II. German operations in France in 1940 amounted to more or less the same sort of military planning used in previous wars in 1870 or 1914, adapted to make use of innovations such as the radio, aircraft and motorized vehicle. Yet Allied observers, primed to think in terms of strategic paralysis, interpreted the German attack in revolutionary terms, rather than as an effective solution to a poor Allied force deployment. Later in the war, the Allies devoted enormous sums to building and operating fleets of bombers intended to either disrupt German society or break the foundations of German industry. Despite those costly and destructive efforts, the war ended only when Russian soldiers captured the German capitol in bloody street-by-street fighting.

Nevertheless, the quest for "strategic paralysis" did not end with World War II. It continued to animate American military thought through the Cold War and beyond. Since the military is, at its core, an extensive state bureaucracy, it's best to understand strategic paralysis in the context of how government bureaucracies perceive the world. The anthropologist and political scientist James Scott has coined the term "High Modernism" to refer to state activity that focuses on how to make the social landscape legible in order to undertake the transformation of society. Notable "high modernist" projects include the construction of the Brazilian capitol of Brasilia and Soviet collectivist agriculture. These projects were based on a simplified model of society that made it appear malleable to state authorities. Such projects have run aground, to greater or lesser extent, on the state's inability to fully understand and internalize the complexity of social systems. The Stalinist state could do many things to the Soviet countryside, but it could not fundamentally penetrate the density and complexity of rural society. Efforts to do so destroyed traditional Russian peasant agriculture, with tragic human costs. Similarly, armies cohere more because of dense human interactions than due to sophisticated communications technologies.

As a doctrine, network centric warfare, like other attempts to create strategic paralysis before it, springs from the same idea as High Modernist projects like Soviet collectivist agriculture: that a complex social structure, whether the social landscape or an enemy army, can be made sufficiently legible as to be subjected to easy manipulation by the state. Such schemes have consistently, and tragically, failed to appreciate the sophistication and complexity of the social systems they seek to influence. Military examples of such failure are legion, the most notable being the failure of strategic airpower in World War II to crush either the morale or industrial capacity of Germany or Japan. More recently, network-centric attacks geared at creating strategic paralysis in Iraq in 1991, Kosovo in 1999 and Lebanon in 2006 failed to have their intended effect. The critical nodes of target states and military organizations turned out not to be so critical; when Saddam could not reach his generals by phone, he sent motorcycle messengers instead.

If there's an upside to this story, it may be that the age of High Modernism appears to be slowly coming to an end. In both the developed and developing world, there seems to be a growing understanding that while the state can deliver some truly wondrous things -- such as health care, education and basic infrastructure -- to its population, there are nevertheless very real limits on how much it can intentionally transform society. In this sense, the doctrine of strategic paralysis may be one of the last, dying gasps of high modernist thought. That such optimism about transformation would persist longer in the military than in other spheres of state activity makes sense in the United States at least, given the popularity and trust that the military continues to enjoy. However, few now seem to believe in the revolutionary impact of a few well-placed bombs and cruise missiles.

Then again, network-centric warfare was replaced in the United States military by counterinsurgency doctrine, a body of thought that, while recognizing the complexity of the human social landscape, has even more grandiose ambitions regarding its legibility and transformation. Indeed, the decision to invade and transform Iraq and Afghanistan might well be the last great High Modernist project, conceived out of a blind optimism about the ability of the state to transform society. Future U.S. military doctrine should strive to recognize the limits of "information dominance," and understand that the lessons of Clausewitz still apply, both to the battlefield and beyond. 

Dr. Robert Farley is an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His interests include national security, military doctrine, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination. His weekly WPR column, Over the Horizon, appears every Wednesday.