Noah Shactman of Wired’s Defense blog Danger Room has written a mammoth article entitled How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic. As he writes on his blog:
The war was launched, in part, on a premise that you could wipe out more bad guys with fewer troops, as long as those troops were networked together. Businesses like Wal-Mart made their supply chain more efficient through information technology; the military could do the same with its “kill chain,” the theory of network-centric warfare went.
The idea — first popularized in article published ten years ago, next month — pretty much worked as advertised, for a while. The problem is, killing people more efficiently is one of the last things you need to do a counterinsurgency situation, like the one the U.S. is facing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, you need to take steps to reinforce civil society, rather than blowing it apart. And that takes an understanding of the society you’re trying to build.
For the story, I scored a rare opportunity to spend time with a U.S. “psychological operations” team, getting into the heads of the people of Fallujah; hung out with an Army colonel who worked his tribal connections to bring stability to one of Iraq’s roughest towns; spent time with the heads of a controversial program to embed anthropologists into combat units; and interviewed General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq.
I’m not going to make it through the piece today (I’m trying to launch the ETech site). It seems a worthy read for anyone who thinks that an over reliance on technology can be too much of a good thing in almost any situation or who’s curious about what is going on over there.