Re: data saturation on in future combat

You wrote: 

>Mikko brings up an excellent point that having all this sensor data 
does >not bring you automatic "situational awareness". This is purely 
my >opinion, but I believe that with all this newfangled sensor 
equipment >ever for today (esp. JSTARs and the digital battlefield 
project), you >have battalion, brigade, and division commanders, that 
have so much data >at their finger tips, that most of them get bogged 
down telling this or >that company commander what he should be doing to 
fight his own company >instead of concentrating on their appropriate 
level of command. This was >a big problem in Desert Storm.

Quite frankly, there are a number of trends leading to this.  First, 
this trend stems from two issues.  A commander is 100% liable for the 
behavior of ALL of his subordinates.  Second, the officer evaluation 
process in the US Army requires a 0 defect mentality--any mistake no 
matter how minor, will wipe out the entire chain of command's careers.	
Hence the leadership gets used to micromanaging their junior leaders in 
peace time and this carries out to a combat environment.  The mid-level 
and senior officers don't trust their junior officers and men to do 
their damn jobs.  My personal feeling is that if you trust the man to 
do his job, then let him do it without jogging his elbow.  If not, 
relieve him NOW and get someone who you can trust.

Possible solutions--first, you need to have people who have lived their 
entire careers with this sort of data flow.  It's unsurprising 1990s 
colonels and lieutenant colonels have difficulty with the flood of 
computor data.	Remember, these guys likely got their commisions 20 
years ago.  The Army (hell, the World) has changed dramatically since 
they were 2LTs.  Next there needs to be a doctrine dealing with this 
increased level of data flow.  As far as I know the Army does not have 
a data flow doctrine per se, and what doctrine their is on the role of 
staff work in weeding out the chaff from the wheat is probably 
WWII-era.  This is being worked on.  You'll also find expert computor 
systems (Central in Hammer's Slammers) which can handle the 
housekeeping and minor details.  Some scout gets lost?	Let the 
computor handle it rather than the Batallion Commander dealing with it 
personally as I have read of occouring in Force XXI exercises.	
Aircraft incoming?  You don't need a staff to deal with it, you need a 
computor coordinating the air defense network and automatically yelling 
to aerospace units for air cover.  Your artillery, air defense, chemmo, 
and some other staff officers may be replaced by little black boxes.

You will also have (at least in my image of colonial warfare in the 
XXIInd century) much smaller forces operating across larger areas 
during the stages of conventional mechanized conflict (force ratios for 
insurgency/counter-insurgency will be something else entirely).  So it 
will not be unusual for a Company Team (the normal level of 
organization for most 'high tech' Dirtside II games I play--I can put 
out 15,000 point Company Teams if I go for Clibanophoroi. I sometimes 
go up the the short batallion size) to have a slice of Batallion and 
brigade level assets--perhaps even troops attached down from division.	

>In special operations, we're there has always been a lot more sensor 
and >state of the art communications gear available, commanders have 
long had >to deal with these problems. Especially on mission the high 
priority >where you could have commanders of the highest level plugged 
into the >net. It's extremely frustrating. I can tell you that on some 
missions it >was a matter of SOP to not report data or report erroneous 
data in >particular regarding our exact where abouts. (Though a certain 
amount of >that goes back to mistrusting the security of the data 
link). Especially >on long missions dealing with other countries we had 
to balance what's >right with what our commanders wanted us to do so 
they would stay out of >hot water with their uppers. So most teams 
failed to report a lot of >their activities in order that no one would 
monkey with them.

I imagine 'misread' grid coordinates, 'interference', 'static', and 
'radio malfunctions' will also play a part in keeping Captain 
Thus-and-So free from nosy interference from higher HQs which may be 
sveral hundred (or hundred thousand) miles away.

>pesky infantry tank killer teams trying to ambush them. He starts
>flooding the company comanders with orders on how to fight his 
company. >Something gets ignored. The company commander has to pull his 
mind off >the fight to argue with the BC. Something is missed, and 
people get >killed. This happens al lot today, there's no reason why it 
won't happen >in the future with even greater data saturation.

First, in such a case in the Nea Rhomaioi Army the Company Commander 
would be cashiered for not turning off his radio and fighting his 
company, and the BC would be cashiered for gross incompetence.	:)  The 
only real solution would be to create a mentality of 'damnit, I'm not 
the man on the ground so I'm not going to interfere' that we saw in 
Washington during Desert Storm.  The SecDef, JCS, and NCA refused to 
get involved in a lot of decisions that they got involved in during 
Vietnam for precisely that reason.  It was unfortunate that noone 
in-theater took a lesson from that and stayed out of decisions too far 
below their link in the chain of command.  Patton once said that a 
commander should issue orders one level down and his maps should not 
show the location of any unit more than two levels down.  A division 
commander should order around his brigades and independant batallions, 
and show batallions of brigades and companies of divisional batallions 
on his main maps.

John M. Atkinson