[iwar] [fc:Information.Dominance.Won't.Guarantee.Success]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-31 22:11:58
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Lawton (OK) Constitution
October 28, 2001
Information Dominance Won't Guarantee Success
By Richard Hart Sinnreich
One unlamented casualty of America's war on terrorism is likely be the
overused and dangerous phrase "information dominance." In a contest in which
reliable information of all kinds--political, financial, military--is
proving to be perhaps the scarcest single strategic commodity, we are having
to relearn a painful lesson: No belligerent however technologically adept
can count on a transparent battlefield unless presented one by his enemy's
carelessness or stupidity. 
Afghanistan's topography, while rugged, is far from impenetrable, and the
Taliban are by no means the world's most capable fighting force.
Nevertheless, from what little we have seen so far, striking Taliban forces
effectively is proving as difficult as it was with Serb forces in Kosovo and
North Vietnamese forces a quarter-century earlier. In all three cases,
absent some mechanism compelling the enemy to expose himself, timely and
reliable information about his whereabouts, condition, and activity, let
alone his intentions, is extraordinarily difficult to acquire. 
That should come as no surprise. The same challenge has characterized every
major U.S. military exercise for the past five years. Indeed, apart from the
use of the commercial airliner as a weapon, our own wargaming has
anticipated virtually everything we have seen so far in this conflict, from
the enemy's conviction that the U.S. and its allies will not endure
prolonged and expensive ground operations, to the dispersal of Taliban
military forces and facilities in and among Afghanistan's hapless civilian
population. 
One consistent feature of those exercises has been the ability of a clever
adversary to hide from, spoof, and otherwise frustrate advanced
reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition systems. In war games
as in the real world, claims that modern sensor technologies will enable us
to find and strike with precision anything that moves on the surface of the
earth repeatedly have proved hollow. That military concepts nevertheless
continue to reflect such claims illustrates what historian Williamson Murray
acidly has characterized as a triumph of faith over learning. 
The real challenge in war is not acquiring perfect information. It is
learning how to fight successfully without it. For the U.S. and other
democracies, that challenge has been vastly compounded by a sea-change in
public and political expectations about the conduct of war, to which
overblown claims of information superiority and targeting precision only
have contributed. To gauge the magnitude of the change, one need only ask
whether public support for the bombing of Germany or Japan in World War II
would have been affected in the slightest by reports that an errant bomb or
two had hit a residential area.
The very suggestion is ludicrous. War at best is an imprecise and messy
enterprise, and the longer it continues, the messier it is likely to become.
That is true even in conventional conflicts in which adversaries ostensibly
acknowledge some distinction however imperfect between fighting forces and
noncombatants. How much more true, then, in wars such as the one in which we
currently are engaged, in which the ruthless attack of civilians provoked
the conflict in the first place, and in which the enemy chooses deliberately
to shield himself behind his own noncombatants?
At some point, unless we are prepared to surrender to terrorism and those
who support it, we and other like-minded nations are going to have to ask
ourselves how much military self-restraint we can tolerate, and at what
price. In arriving at a defensible answer to that question, a realistic
appraisal of the limits of certainty and precision is essential. The surest
way to demolish public support for war is to assert or imply an intention to
limit its direct and collateral costs that our own experience confirms we
can't achieve without jeopardizing the very prospect of victory. 
Applied to Afghanistan, that suggests that, one way or another, defeat of
the Taliban is improbable without even worse collateral civilian casualties
and damage than we have seen so far. These are virtually guaranteed if
decisive ground combat operations are conducted by the Afghans themselves,
but they are nearly as likely should U.S. and allied ground forces intervene
directly. Certainly, nothing we have seen in past operations or war games
suggests that the sort of "surgical" operations implied by catch-phrases
like information dominance are even remotely realistic. 
Applied more broadly, the difficulty of acquiring unambiguous information
suggests that, at some point, America and its allies will have to decide
just how much "hard" evidence really is necessary to justify military action
against states widely known to sponsor terrorist activities or provide them
aid and comfort. 
Until now, for Americans protected by oceans, military self-delusion has
been costly only in decisive victory forfeited and the lives of servicemen
and women squandered. But the cost has just gone up, and it is likely in the
future to become even steeper. Unless we are prepared to absorb it, we
somehow must come to terms with war's intrinsic uncertainty and its
inescapably unpleasant consequences.
Richard Hart Sinnreich writes regularly for The Sunday Constitution. 

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