In the Army's vision, the war of the future is increasingly combat by mouse clicks. It's as networked as the Internet, as mobile as a cellphone, as intuitive as a video game. The Army has a name for this vision: Future Combat Systems, or FCS. The project involves creating a family of 14 weapons, drones, robots, sensors and hybrid-electric combat vehicles connected by a wireless network. It has turned into the most ambitious modernization of the Army since World War II and the most expensive Army weapons program ever, military officials say.

It's also one of the most controversial. Even as some early versions of these weapons make their way onto the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, members of Congress, government investigators and military observers question whether the Defense Department has set the stage for one of its biggest and costliest failures. At risk, they say, are billions of taxpayer dollars spent on exotic technology that may never come to fruition, leaving the Army little time and few resources to prepare for new threats.

See also DoD Transformation: Challenges and Opportunities, a recent presentation by the Comptroller General. Several other recent presentations are also available, including:

"U.S. Financial Condition and Fiscal Future Briefing," by David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States, before the Center for Governmental Accounting Education and Research's Annual Conference, at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. GAO-08-340CG, November 30.

"Saving Our Future Requires Tough Choices Today," by David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States, on the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa. GAO-08-337CG, December 3.

"America's Fiscal Future," by David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States, before the Greater Washington Society of CPAs' Annual Not For Profit Organization Symposium, in Washington, D.C. GAO-08-339CG, December 5.

The Army's $200 Billion Makeover

There's nothing like the right TV spot to heal the sectarian divide.

Virtually every action, message, and decision of a military force shapes the opinions of an indigenous population: strategic communication, treatment of civilians at vehicle checkpoints, and the accuracy or inaccuracy of aerial bombardment.

Themes of US goodwill mean little if its actions convey otherwise. Consequently, a unified message in both word and deed is fundamental to success.

Business marketing practices provide a useful framework for improving US military efforts to shape the attitudes and behaviors of local populations in a theater of operations as well as those of a broader, international audience.

Enlisting Madison Avenue extracts lessons from these business practices and adapts them to US military efforts, developing a unique approach to shaping that has the potential to improve military-civilian relations, the accuracy of media coverage of operations, communication of US and coalition objectives, and the reputation of US forces in theater and internationally.

Foremost among these lessons are the concepts of branding, customer satisfaction, and segmentation of the target audience, all of which serve to maximize the impact and improve the outcome of US shaping efforts.

Beware the AdWords on Google Arabic:

We were surprised at the success with Arabic. Keywords in Arabic were among the top performers with click-through rates often exceeding 30%.

Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation

Here, in a study published in June 2006 by the military's Joint Special Operations University, two "information warfare" specialists mull over how the US armed forces and intelligence agencies might influence opinion overseas through foreign bloggers:

... [I]t may be easy for foreign audiences to dismiss the US perspective with "Yes, but you aren't one of us, you don't really understand us."

In this regard, information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence already within the target nation, group or community to pass the US message. ... Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the US military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

An alternative strategy is to "make" a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however. ...

There will also be times when it is thought to be necessary, in the context of an integrated information campaign, to pass false or erroneous information through the media ... in support of military deception activities. ... In these cases, extra care must be taken to ensure plausible deniability and nonattribution, as well as employing a well-thought-out deception operation that minimizes the risks of exposure.

General Memetics, on Tom Ricks's Inbox

Here is retired Army Gen. John Abizaid, former CENTCOM commander, on June 20, at Transformation Warfare '07:

“The enemy is in fact more networked, more decentralized, and operates within a broader commander’s intent than any 20th century foe we’ve ever met,” he said. “In fact, this enemy is better networked than we are.”

Tapping information is particularly vital to empower lower-level American soldiers in theater, but the “architectures and the switches” are now being pulled by generals and politicians, he said.

He said because too many stovepipes and bureaucrats hamper the effective use of technology in the field, it may be time for a national dialogue after the 2008 elections about reforming the defense establishment to fight future wars.

Abizaid scolded reporters for not telling enough stories about the enemy.

Audio for sale here.

See also the on-scene report:

"It does take a network to beat a network, and our network must be better."

"It's more about people; it's more about taking risks," General Keys said. "It's more about changing the rules and (getting) a clean sheet of paper."

Abizaid: US military has failed to embrace cyberspace in terror war

The Director, Defense Research and Engineering, John Young today announced a public prize competition to develop a wearable electric power system for war fighters. The competition will take place in the fall of 2008 and the prizes are $1 million for first place, $500,000 for second place and $250,000 for third place.

The prize objective is a wearable, prototype system that can power a standard warfighter’s equipment for 96 hours but weighs less than half that of the current batteries carried. All components, including the power generator, electrical storage, control electronics, connectors and fuel must weigh four kilograms or less, including any attachments.

See the prize website for more information. (I think they should start by having a competition to design a better website for the competition.)

DoD Announces 'Wearable Power' Prize Competition

Many moons ago, I posed the question:

Is there a market for a monthly magazine that is a cross between Vogue and Foreign Affairs?

Well, I recently learned that Jezebel took a cut at what such a magazine might look like:

'Jane's Defence Weekly' is a weekly military mag covering topics pertinent to national and international defense and security, and the main reason our dad was impressed this one time we told him we were writing a story for 'Jane' magazine. Below, we take the pun wayyyy further than we ever probably should have by asking 'Jane's Defence Weekly' reporter Nathan Hodge to interpret world events in the flip, casual, sophomoric voice a 'Jane' reader would understand!

Here's a snippet:

Q: Angelina Jolie was just named to the Council on Foreign Relations. Do celebrities really help solve anything?
Hodge: I think Angelina Jolie would do a better job of winning hearts and minds then say, [former Bush flack] Karen Hughes, who recently did a a listening tour of the Middle East as the lead State Department outreach person for boosting America's image in the Middle East. It was a failure. The problem you have in the military is that there's a belief you can invent a ray gun that you can zap people with and they will like you. The way you want to go about solving conflicts it is by improving your information campaign--winning hearts and minds of people. It's like how we won the Cold War - we won because people didn't want to wear shoes made in Leningrad and wanted to listen to bootleg Deep Purple records.

Q: Are all the celebs trying to heal Africa right now, or are any of them digging missile defense?
Hodge: Do you know who Jeff Skunk Baxter is?

Q: Uh, no?
Hodge: He was in the Doobie Brothers. He's really into missile defense.

Q: Whoa, so he is! Weird.

Oh, Skunk rocks! I heard him rant about how electronic collaboration should be more like great jazz. (Or something. It was a while back.)

That's So Jane's! Miss Universe As A Metaphor For Geopolitics

Code is Law.

The idea of network-centric operations initially was inspired by developments in the IT-industry in the 1990s. But while today’s internet industry is happily nurturing a new boom revolving around Web 2.0, the defense establishment is haplessly managing counterinsurgency and stability operations. Yet a closer look at the two seemingly separate trends brings to light striking similarities. War’s changing character is not only augmented by the emergence of the new media; the way the web and today’s communication devices are used to organize lives also instructs our understanding of how killing is organized. The argument put forward here is that the web’s emerging organizing principles — including a social as well as a technological dimension — increasingly govern the management of violence. The new media consequently offer both a set of new metaphors to understand the character of today’s wars and a socio-technological platform that remodels the architecture of battle.

AJAX is Bad Law.

War 2.0

When he was hired by the DIA, he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with ... If the everyday Internet was so awesome, just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.

But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. "The reality," he later wrote ruefully, "was a colossal letdown."

In this essay for the NYT Sunday magazine, Clive Thompson refers to the white paper by Calvin Andrus, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, which was recommended here back in July. (Also at CSI. Slides here.)

Following the threads from this article ...

Next up: the ouster of neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, the manipulative pro-consul in Baghdad, and his replacement by Ryan Crocker, a long-time Arabist who recently served as U.S. ambassador to Syria.

Thomas Fingar [2] "manages the production of the President's Daily Brief." He's an SES and an old China hand. He spoke in August, giving a talk entitled Intelink and Beyond: Dare to Share.

"I think in the future you'll press a button and this will be the NIE," said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis.

In 2004 Wertheimer wrote in the Washington Post:

To succeed we must demand far less near-term intelligence product from the Signals Intelligence community, give it control of its resources and allow it to plan for a disruptive future, a future that is presaged by videos that show an Afghan warlord exhorting his terrorist followers not to use satellite phones for fear of American capture.

He spoke recently at InfoTech 2006; his presentation, Technology Transformation for Analysis: Year One Report, isn't really online, but others at the conference are here.

According to Michael Wertheimer, who held the most senior technical position at th... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

Open-Source Spying

Rather belatedly, the Army attempts to clear up some recent FUD (widely reported, including here) about SINCGARS.

US servicemembers can use the SINCGARS radio system with confidence.

Recent media articles [about Hezbollah's use of Iranian technology to defeat SINCGARS security] are wrong.

The Israelis do not use the US SINCGARS system, but rather they use another frequency-hopping technology.

"These articles lead people to think that SINCGARS is vulnerable, and that this technology is available to bad guys. This is not the case. The Israelis do not have SINCGARS radios. They have another frequency-hopping radio that does not have the US frequency-hopping algorithm, does not use the US communications security devices and does not use the US transmission security devices. All three provide robust protection for US SINCGARS."

It may still be safe, but it is certainly getting old, as this concluding remark, to his fellow soliders in the field, makes clear:

Bowden noted that he has been working on SINCGARS since the 1980s and can answer any questions about it.

SINCGARS Radio System Remains Secure

Hezbollah guerrillas were able to hack into Israeli radio communications during last month's battles in south Lebanon, an intelligence breakthrough that helped them thwart Israeli tank assaults, according to Hezbollah and Lebanese officials.

UPDATE: The Army says it just ain't so. Or, rather, the Army clarifies that the hacked radios were not SINCGARS.

Hezbollah cracked the code