BATTLEFIELD OF THE FUTURE

BATTLEFIELD OF THE FUTURE
However, information warfare might not always be a
supporting function ; it might take a leading role in future
campaigns . This makes it both more important and more
challenging to get the organizational issue right . By 2020, at
least in some militaries, the requirements of the battlefield will
be such that traditional hierarchical command and control
arrangements will be obsolete . In most organizations today,
the decentralization trend is already well established .
Information technology is making distributed systems
commonplace, and "virtual organizations" are growing like
cultures on a petri dish . The rapid rate of growth of these
types of new organizational entities would seem to suggest
strengths that the military would be wise to examine .
Dominating Maneuver
One of the more recently identified potential new warfare
areas is dominating maneuver . Maneuver has always been an
essential element in warfare, but the RMA potentially offers
the ability to conduct maneuver on a global scale, on a
much-compressed time scale, and with greatly reduced forces .
We define dominating maneuver as the positioning of forcesintegrated
with precision strike, space warfare, and information
war operations-to attack decisive points, defeat the enemy
center of gravity, and accomplish campaign or war objectives .
While precision strike and information warfare are destroying
enemy assets and disrupting his situational awareness,
dominating maneuver will strike at the enemy center of gravity
to put him in an untenable position, leaving him with no choice
but to accept defeat or accede to the demands placed on him .
War is typically nonlinear, meaning that the smallest effects
can have unpredicted, disproportionate consequences . In
meteorology, nonlinearity is illustrated through the "butterfly
effect"-a butterfly flapping its wings in the southern hemisphere
can set off a string of reactions that eventually result in
a violent storm in the northern hemisphere .
In the early nineteenth century, Clausewitz made similar
observations when discussing the formulation of successful
strategy . He wrote that victory comes not through winning
battles or inflicting attrition but through attacking the enemy
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