Fully Wired War??

Stan McChrystal’s Very Human Wired War
from Danger Room by Spencer Ackerman

Here are 10 years’ worth of military trends, distilled into one poorly-lit Beltway hotel ballroom. A defense group holds a conference on the latest technology to link up troops and rapidly spread wartime information. It invites a hero of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency to share his thoughts on the subject. They boil down to this: technology’s awesome, but what matters are the people it connects.

That’s what happened when Stanley McChrystal, the ex-Afghanistan commander and special-ops leader, spoke this afternoon to the Network-Centric Warfare conference in Arlington, Virginia. In a rare speech, McChrystal praised the “aggressive use of technology” that the rest of the conference celebrates. But “by far the hardest part” of networked warfare, he said, was “to create a culture” that gets different military and civilian units linked up by technology fighting as a team. In other words, the technical network won’t work without the social one.

“You don’t give a senior leader a Blackberry or an iPhone and make them a digital leader,” McChrystal said. Today’s commanders might spend endless hours on video conferences talking to their subordinates around the world. But without a “shared consciousness and purpose” across team members who come from very different backgrounds, they might as well close their Skype windows.

Reaching the height of its influence under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, network-centric war proponents like the late Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski argued that linking troops together with better communications and information-tech tools would create a faster, lighter and more efficient military. But those thinkers warned that the gear wouldn’t work without an internal cultural shift; some proponents even proposed junking the armed forces’ hierarchy to accommodate a new, information age military.

The problem was, the networks were closed loops, and inward-facing. They neglected the need for a military to understand the distinct cultures of populations they interacted with. Without that, the best-connected troops were still hobbled by ignorance. That oversight contributed mightily to the U.S.’ troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it allowed a new generation of military theorists to rise to prominence: the counterinsurgents, who argue that local knowledge and cultural understanding is the best asset a military can cultivate.


Put McChrystal — now a Yale lecturer after losing his command for intemperate remarks in a magazine profile – down in the latter category. Pointing at a map of the Middle East, he lamented, “We don’t understand the complex environment… in the ways we ought to.” If you don’t get that, then the best tools to share information just pass ignorance along more efficiently.

It’s misleading to blithely say that the network-centric people are tech-supremacists and the counterinsurgents are Luddites. Cebrowski and his followers were ultimately about maximizing the potential of individual troops. Counterinsurgents use drones, precision munitions, sensor-packed blimps and, soon, tablet-launched maps to wage their wars.

To McChrystal, the real networked warfare is one that includes “the entirety of the community of interest.” That means having the support of civilians and local security forces in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, since they know their home countries better than the U.S. military will. And it also means building links to different military, intelligence and civilian organizations that have a different organizational culture than the one a particular commander might establish.

If that seems elementary, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the conference. Speaking before McChrystal was Brig. Gen. Joe Brendler, the chief of staff of the Defense Information Systems Agency. His take on networked war was about getting internal military computer networks to expand information access among network users. Industry representatives had similar ideas. Boston’s Digital Results Group displayed a program it designed that superimposed displays of bomb-attack patterns on a map of a city, while pop-up windows showed the results of communications intercepts, video of the results of nearby drone strikes, and even the latest Fox news broadcast. The idea is to push that “common operating picture” onto soldiers’ ToughBooks.

McChrystal’s less concerned. “The communications systems, UAVs [drones], intelligence systems, none of that was around when I was younger,” he said. McChrystal’s point isn’t that all that gear is unfamiliar or irrelevant — just insufficient.

When he was in charge of Joint Special Operations Command, McChrystal recalled, he couldn’t get information fast enough on a certain one-legged Taliban leader who kept crossing the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. So McChrystal “came back to D.C. to talk to one of our intelligence agencies” and learned it had good targeting information on the insurgent. Only the intelligence agency couldn’t pass it to McChrystal until he agreed that his commandos “wouldn’t go across the border,” for legal reasons. Once that boundary was broken down, the intel agency became part of McChrystal’s network.

The result? The Taliban leader “is dead,” McChrystal recalled, “and we actually got his leg.” The targeting tech was essential; the cultural ties allowed McChrystal to make it relevant. And it’s those human connections that bring the net-centric warrior closer to the counterinsurgent, too.