Perspectives on Technology & Transformation
MIT’s Technology Review interviews John Arquilla, one of the people who pioneered the idea of “The Revolution In Military Affairs” (aka. transformation, network-centric warfare). It notes:
“Yet what if the Pentagon’s big platforms weren’t merely the wrong weapon systems to fight present and future wars, but actually likely to bring defeat? John Arquilla, one of the military intellectuals who created and promoted the concept of “transformation” for the U.S. military, believes that may be the case. Arquilla teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, and is a RAND consultant and a Pentagon advisor. His publications include Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, [see also shorter paper], In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age and the forthcoming The Reagan Imprint: Ideas in American Foreign Policy from the Collapse of Communism to the War on Terror.”
Agree or disagree, he’s always worth reading. Here are a few more recent articles that tie into the Arquilla article’s points. or feature additional thought-provoking material and ideas which could impact military procurement down the road.
- Belmont Club (March 20/06) – More GWOT Documents Are Released. Arquilla mentions data mining, and Belmont Club notes that in addition to the release of documents from Iraq:
bq. “The release of detainee interrogation transcripts [from Guantanamo Bay] is unlikely to be the last event of the sort. There are many other research situations, some in the natural sciences, where there is more data than human analytical capability which can benefit from a dataset release to the public. Data dumps may not long be confined to Iraq-related documents. Supposing that were so, the organization of the blogosphere itself is likely to evolve to meet the challenge. Since not all bloggers will be equally interested in detainee interrogations, networks of specialists are likely to arise in order to perform data mining. A market in information nuggets will probably arise to consume the product.”
Then we come to a pair of reviews of Neither Shall the Sword by Retired Air Force Reserve Col. Chet Richards. It’s a sequel to his 2001 book A Swift, Elusive Sword, in which he made some radical arguments for the restructuring of the U.S. military:
- Thomas P.M. Barnett weblog (March 14/06) – A quick review of Neither Shall the Sword by Chet Richards. Barnett is the author of the Pentagon’s New Map, and some of his work was covered in this DID post. Speaking of various scenarios for military structural and mission-related evolution, he notes:
bq. “…note the very cool graphic on how the Sword Force evolves into Leviathan and SysAdmin forces over time, along with the privatizing option on the Levithan. That’s found on page 79.”
- GovExec.com (Feb 21/06) – Radical Reformer
bq. “Few have gone as far as Richards in their proposals for change. In developing options for grand strategy, he parses the recent work of leading military reformers and thinkers, including Thomas X. Hammes, Martin van Creveld, William Lind and Thomas P.M. Barnett. Ultimately, Richards concludes, it’s a choice between very new and substantially different versions of the Cold War staples of “containment” and “rollback.” Whichever variations are adopted will require different models for reconfiguring American forces.”
