Micro-Managing the War by E-mail

In 2004, Captain Tyler Boudreau made what he thought was a pretty routine call: to okay a medevac back to headquarters a couple of wounded Iraqis. But when every general, colonel, and major in Iraq is tied to e-mail and IM, Boudreau writes in the* Industry Standard*, junior officers like him suddenly find even their routine calls second-guessed. Especially when it turns out that the wounded Iraqis were found near a firefight. Especially when it turns out that Boudreau's patrol leader on the scene decided to let the pair go, before the medevac copter could arrive.

Headquarters was furious... It was as though the whole war was suddenly lost... For the next several hours, I was bombarded with emails from headquarters demanding answers. Every question was preceded with the ominous phrase: "The General wants to know...""Why didn't they wait?"

"Because the man was bleeding to death."

"What was the caliber of the gunshot wound?" (They actually asked.)

No idea. I don't think they broke out their tape measures or ripped off the man's bandages. Then I typed angrily, "Unknown."

"How much blood was lost?"

This continued for two more days. And it lead Boudreau to conclude that a military network's real weak point isn't storage capacity, or bandwidth. "There is a limit to how much a soldier on the ground can convey with the pressures of time, heat, exhaustion, and possibly enemy fire bearing down," he writes. "Consequently, any tactical picture formed in remote command posts can't help but obscure the nuances of the peculiar scenarios that patrolling soldiers face on the ground."

Network theory holds that the network gets stronger with every additional node. And there are countless thousands of examples of that being proven out on military. But on the battlefield, the inverse may sometimes be true, as well.

Major Tommy Sowers writes in the April issue of West Point's Sentintel.

For the monitored, time spent quantifying efforts, writing situation reports or reporting to higher command is time spent off delegated tasks. Furthermore, persistent monitoring reduces the risks taken by subordinates, reducing their discretion and pushing up many decisions once made at their level.

Sowers says the headquarters weenies doing all the double-checking pay a price, as well. So does the Army, as a whole.

*For the monitor, time processing the deluge of information, or waiting for a more accurate and timely report, comes at a cost... Truth on the battlefield costs time, lives and supplies. Ignorance is free. Now that senior leaders can nanomanage a distant action, when everyone rushes to the sounds of the guns, who is planning, who is thinking, who is directing what will occur when those guns go silent? *