BATTLEFIELD OF THE FUTURE

BATTLEFIELD OF THE FUTURE
air and missile defense and air superiority over the battle zone .
As Col Warden has warned, surface forces and logistical
support units are fragile at the operational level of war,
especially against highly armed challengers .
Supporting significant numbers of surface forces (air, land, or
sea) is a tough administrative problem even in peacetime .
Success depends upon efficient distribution of information, fuel,
food, and ammunition . By necessity, efficient distribution
depends on an inverted pyramid of distribution . Supplies of all
operational commodities must be accumulated in one or two
locations, then parsed out to two or four locations, and so on
until they eventually reach the user . The nodes in the system are
exceptionally vulnerable to precision attack.4s
In short, while the United States and its allies may be able
to handle a NASTI regime such as Iraq in 1991, in the future it
may be dealing with adversaries that have mastered the
building of accurate ballistic missiles, nuclear warheads,
chemically armed reentry vehicles, and relatively cheap,
hard-to-detect cruise missiles . At that point, MRC forces and
their logistics tails had better reduce their vulnerabilities by
application of deterrence, preemptive strikes, defenses,
deployment outside of enemy range, dispersion of units,
constant mobility, or diversity of supply paths in order to avoid
defeat .
Information Dominance
The importance of winning the information war should be a
guiding principle of wars of the future . A US Army study predicts
that "effective information operations will make battlespace
transparent to us and opaque to our opponents . 47 Such, at
least, is the goal .
One of the air commanders of the GulfWar also emphasizes
the importance of information at the strategic and operational
levels . He notes that
In the Gulf War, the coalition deprived Iraq of most of its ability to
gather and use information . At the same time, the coalition
managed its own information requirements acceptably, even
though it was organized in the same way Frederick the Great had
organized himself. Clear for the future is the requirement to
redesign our organizations so they are built to exploit modern
information-handling equipment . This also means flattening
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