Re: data saturation on in future combat

John Atkinson wrote:

> You wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>

Agree.

> 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.
>

Exactly.

> 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.
>
>

Yes I too see self sufficient company task forces handling most actions
in the FT universe at least. . Unless you have huge transports, it seems
like the largest reasonbably sized element you can get squeezed in with
all its equipment and logistical tail into an assault transport.

> 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
>

there were a lot of good anecdotes in Shhwartzkopf's book about some of
the monkeying around cabinet members were trying to do. Good thing he
had Powell running interference. Some were even calling him MacLellan
because he refused to alunch an offensive befre christmas. haha

Los