The Mirage of the Interconnected Battlefield
Jack Watling | 01.21.22
During an exercise in the California desert in October 2021 a special operations forces team hit the jackpot. Beneath the team’s observation post were almost a hundred enemy vehicles rolling through a refueling point. The team had eyes on target and fires on call. It should have been a decisive moment in the exercise, the kind of opportunity that so much modern doctrine strives to capitalize upon. Alas it was not to be.
Unlike the decades-long wars following 9/11, in which NATO forces fought in small formations with few constraints imposed by enemy fires threatening supporting infrastructure and little interference from electronic warfare, this force-on-force exercise replicated a congested battlespace and a contested electromagnetic spectrum. In the face of insufficient nodes in their communications network, saturated headquarters, and enemy jamming, the kill chain for the fire mission took four hours to complete. It killed some enemy logisticians, but the opportunity had long passed.
Today, staff officers the world over are heralding the dawn of an interconnected battlefield in which data can move seamlessly between air, land, maritime, space, and cyber forces in real time. PowerPoint and CGI presentations promise commanders continual access to pervasive and perpetually relevant situational awareness. Senior officers lap it up because it is what they have always dreamed of. The ability to access the data from any battlefield sensor across a force and share it with the most appropriate shooter holds out the prospect of maximizing a force’s lethality and efficiency while denying the enemy the opportunity to achieve surprise.
https://mwi.usma.edu/the-mirage-of-the-interconnected-battlefield/
