| Tuesday, May 20, 2003 |
11:53 - Lima lima mike foxtrot
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/battlefield_pr.html
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Via The Command Post-- here's a fascinating and very entertaining Wired article on Rumsfeld's Great Experiment: the digital war. It's all about "swarm theory", the high-speed deployment tactic that swooshed past the Iraqi defenses like the Blitz past the Maginot Line. On the ground, it doesn't look much like the grand hype suggests; but that's okay, because it's even cooler. This war, apparently, was won with store-bought GPS units, consumer walkie-talkies, and Microsoft Chat.
Swarm theory is also moving online - into chat rooms, an application Mims is pioneering for military purposes. When a problem develops on the battlefield, a soldier radios a Tactical Operations Center. The TOC intelligence guy types the problem into a chat session - Mims and his colleagues use Microsoft Chat - and the problem is "swarmed" by experts from the Pentagon to Centcom. Not only is the technology changing the way we maneuver, Mims notes, it's changing the way we think.
But the system is not without problems. Because anyone on Siprnet who wanted to could set up a chat, 50 rooms sprang up in the months before the war. The result: information overload. "We've started throwing people out of the rooms who don't belong there," Mims says.
"What's funny about using Microsoft Chat," he adds with a sly smile, "is that everybody has to choosean icon to represent themselves. Some of these guys haven't bothered, so the program assigns them one. We'll be in the middle of a battle and a bunch of field artillery colonels will come online in the form of these big-breasted blondes. We've got a few space aliens, too."
Great stuff.
(And from the sound of this, ours is the most informal, fast-and-loose armed force in the history of the world.)
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