Free Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn

enemy from doing so, we have dominant battlefield awareness,” Admiral William Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in 2001, “and we are certain to prevail in a conflict.” Owens, an influential figure who talked about RMA (revolution in military affairs) a lot, also coined the acronym ISR for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance , a term destined to loom ever larger in intelligence planning and budgets. Other high-ranking officers talked wistfully of how “if we had today’s sensors, we would have won in Vietnam.”
    Another influential admiral, Arthur Cebrowski, is credited with inventing the term net-centric to describe the virtues and possibilities of connecting all sources of information—planes, ships, drones, the more the better—to put them in constant communication with a central processor and each other. He drew inspiration from the Wal-Mart chain of superstores, deemed a net-centric organization because every time a cash register rang up a light-bulb sale, a central computer automatically ordered a new bulb from the supplier.
    Much of the excitement had been generated by the rapidly increasing power of computers. The Pentium III microprocessor introduced in 1998, for example, had a “clock speed” eighty times faster than that of Task Force Alpha’s IBM 360/65 and over a hundred thousand times more directly accessible memory. But while computers had become more powerful, the sensors providing the information, such as infrared and TV cameras, still could not distinguish one hot spot from another or see through smoke or haze. These were facts of life that would not go away.
    This inherent problem was apparently lost on Cebrowski, who suggested that if every soldier and warplane was connected up like the Wal-Mart cash registers, an entire force could operate as a coordinated mechanism, identifying and destroying targets with maximum efficiency and discrimination. Jasons pondering how to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail back in the summer of 1966 would have caught on to the idea immediately. Unsurprisingly, the defense intelligentsia was quick to fall into line. Two Rand Corporation researchers, David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, academic foot soldiers in the revolution in military affairs, popularized the notions of “cyberwar” and “netwar” as well as the catchy slogan “It takes a network to defeat a network.”
    Meanwhile, politicians were getting in on the act. In 1996 Senators Joseph Lieberman and Dan Coats sponsored a National Defense Panel as a forum to advance “the revolution in military affairs.” Andrew Krepinevich, the Marshall aide who had coined the revolutionary slogan, was picked to represent the senate Democrats on the panel. The Republicans selected a burly former naval officer and fellow graduate of the Marshall office, Richard Armitage. Their report, “Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st Century,” was a paean to revolutionary techno-wizardry, thanks to which a transformed military would be able to “project power” around the globe. Prominent in their conception was a huge role for unmanned aircraft—drones—in every aspect of the fight. “Air forces,” for example “would place greater emphasis on operating at extended ranges, relying heavily on long-range aircraft and extended-range unmanned systems, employing advanced precision and brilliant munitions.… Aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, and unmanned combat aerial vehicles operating in theater could stage at peripheral bases outside enemy missile range…”
    Not everyone bought in. Paul Van Riper, for example, an acerbic and somewhat intimidating three-star marine general, publicly derided the doctrine of “information superiority,” as preached by Owens, Cebrowski, and others, which he said consisted of “sweeping assertions and dogmatic platitudes.” Nor did Van Riper think much of airpower enthusiasts in general, on occasion delivering a speech entitled