The agility imperative - a revelation in military affairs.indd

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The agility imperative: a revelation in military affairs War fi ghting in the 21 st century and the information age is more about the speed of learning than it is about the speed of reloading. Granted, this simplistic understanding of modern warfare is enticingly suggestive in that it appears to focus on something more than just destruction. The notion that the number of tanks or warships you have matters less than your ability to think network rather than linearly is comforting. But gone is also the physical certainty of winning or losing decisive battles and formal surrenders of state actors. The security environment is driven by an unparalleled explosion in information transfer that has affected how humans fundamentally organise and develop ideas. The military cannot avoid the impact of these developments and the challenges they present. By the end of 2013 the agility imperative will likely stand out as one of the defi ning characteristics necessary for military organisations to fi ght wars in the 21 st century. By Dr William Mitchell The military legacy of learning – or not Military history is full of moments where military organisations learned the hard way that maintaining organisations, technologies and doctrine for war fighting based on tradition and routine rather than environment can have terrible consequences. Few to none of these have been celebrated as victors or heroes, most pitied as the unfortunate victims of modernisation. And like other significant times in military history driven by technological breakthroughs, there is a period of transition within both the physical and cognitive dimensions of the war fighting environment. From the spear to the armed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), from the romantic idealism of chivalry to the legal rationality of the Law of Armed Conflicts, the environment in which we fight is constantly evolving and always has. However, the information age is more than a physical attribute of the modern war fighting environment; its impact is on the dynamic of change itself. There is no doubt that the onset of the information age has affected every aspect of human life: how we think, how we manage information, how we use the information, how we communicate with each other. It has also set in motion a pace of learning, development and change that is perpetually accelerating. The faster we learn from each other, the faster we adapt, innovate, develop and respond. We are exploiting knowledge faster and over greater distances than at any other point in history. The context of military operations is not a separate universe from the one all humans are expected to operate in. It is this environment of information hyper drive that the 20 th -century military has found itself struggling to adapt to. Struggling with retaining, discovering and recreating its own identity and history. Struggling to fit a fast changing world that only a short 30 years ago was still slow enough to provide a rock solid raison d’étre for continuing the way the military has generally organised itself since the time of Napoleon. Military history is full of significant leaps forward in military organisation, doctrine and technology. Examples are many: the invention and employment of chariots, flex bows, longbows, gunpowder, cannons and, more recently, machine guns, aircraft, the tank by the British, its effective use by the Germans. There are many. 2
However, despite being significant leaps, sometimes heralded as revolutions in military affairs (RMAs), they have all had limited periods of dominating success, mainly because human opponents do what human opponents do best when faced with annihilation – learn quickly how to survive. The agility imperative: a revelation in military affairs But this time the change is different. This time it is not a technological development in itself or a new way of using technology in terms of doctrine or organisation providing the fortunate commander complete battlespace domination. This time it is a much deeper and fundamental change. This time it does not resemble a revolution in military affairs as much as it resembles a revelation. The war fighter may not like to use the word ‘ontology’, but war fighting organisations are already planning and fighting ontologically. For those not familiar with the word ontology, it simply refers to the study of categories of realities. Today’s military is working operationally with two ‘reality’ categories of ontology, the cognitive and the physical. And though the cognitive reality consisting of subjective beliefs, understandings, perceptions, identities and norms has always been there, the information age has significantly amplified its importance to military operations. As of 2013, the armies, navies, air forces and marines throughout the Alliance can be found discussing the merits of narrative lead operations, lines of operations for social media and the importance of culture to situational understanding. What must sound even more bizarre to some traditionalists are military discussions on the harmonisation and synchronisation of kinetics and non-kinetics for the destruction or construction of things and/or ideas, understandings or narratives. Pragmatism and enlightenment Over the last five years the military has engaged the cognitive and physical realities of the battlespace through complex ‘system of systems analysis’ known (somewhat lovingly) to some as SoSA. These networked-defined understandings of battlespaces such as ‘PMESII’, representing the interaction between the Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure and Information domains of a battlespace, attempt to delineate and describe and synthesise the two realities of the battlespace. This understanding is then combined with an effects-based thinking (EBT) philosophy that attempts to manage the interaction between the PMESII domains or, if you wish, between the two realities, the cognitive and the physical. Light-heartedly translated as ‘blow something up at the right time and place to create a perception – or if you wish – at the right time and place destroy a perception by not blowing something up’. And despite the echoes of ‘common sense’ ringing somewhere in the background of this perpetual interaction between the cognitive and the physical dimensions, from a scientific perspective it is a complex ontological relationship between two categories of realities. Now, imagine what the Internet or social media has done to 3
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The agility imperative - a revelation in military affairs.indd

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