Legibility

My column at WPR this week involved some thoughts about how to think about the informational demands of modern military doctrine. Most people are familiar with the modern debate about the "fog of war," whether it exists as a consequence of the shortcomings of communications and sensor technology, or whether it results from human psychology, strategic interaction, and the nature of data aggregation. The first perspective suggests that the fog of war is essentially a remediable problem; improve intelligence gathering and communication, and the battlefield can be rendered legible and subject to manipulation. The second perspective implies important limits on the extent to which the fog can ever be cleared; the fog exists in part because of the way the human mind functions, in part as a consequence of the inevitable unpredictability of human interaction, and in part because the accumulation of information does not, in and of itself, result in a clearer picture of the situation. While most approaches to military doctrine in the past twenty years accept some premises from both positions, the strand of thinking most often associated with Effects Based Operations and Network Centric Warfare leans heavily on the "fog of war is remediable" side.

The column starts from the argument about strategic paralysis set forth here by Adam Elkus. I argue that EBO and NCW (not to mention older theories of strategic paralysis) should be understood as part of a family of concepts of state action, best described by James Scott as "high modernism." Long story short, high modernism is associated with the idea that with sufficient information the state can transform society, with the caveat that the process of acquiring information can itself be very destructive. Think Soviet collectivist agriculture, which was as much an ideologically driven effort to destroy the peasantry as it was the easiest way for the Soviet state to get a grip on the what, where, and how of grain production. Such projects tend to make insufficient allowance for the complexity of society, whether than society be Russian peasant agriculture or the organizational structure of an enemy army.

The argument can surely be taken too far, but given the absurd level of difficulty involved with predicting fairly simple social phenomena, the idea that we can predict organizational behavior sufficient to know that the destruction of a particular communications, logistical, or political "node" will cause strategic paralysis does seem very ambitious. Almost revolutionary, indeed.