Let me review, at his challenge, the ten themes Scales set forth about future war in 1999. Mind you, it speaks well of him to predict the future and then stand by them when the future approaches. As he notes, predictions about future war shouldn't be about getting the future right, it is about not getting it too wrong to win.
I'll do them one at a time in separate posts. This is the fourth post. Let me preface this effort with my warning from my 2002 Military Review article (starting on p. 28) about the projected FCS that was the primary weapons system envisioned by those planning efforts:
Barring successfully fielding exotic technologies to make the FCS work, the Army must consider how it will defeat future heavy systems if fighting actual enemies and not merely suppressing disorder becomes its mission once again. The tentative assumptions of 2001 will change by 2025. When they do, the Army will rue its failure today to accept that the wonder tank will not be built.
The fourth theme from 1999 is:
4. Establish an “Unblinking Eye” Over the Battlefield
Lighter and smaller early-arriving forces can win against a more numerous and heavier enemy only if they are protected by an “unblinking eye” — a constant, reliable, ubiquitous, and overwhelmingly dominant sphere of information emanating from unmanned aerial platforms.
This is happening. Although it is not so widespread that it covers an entire theater and penetrates into all terrains to provide that information. But it is capable of putting a pretty good bubble over moving units in addition to covering the area around static bases.
I did assume such an unblinking eye in this 2002 article (see "Equipping the Objective Force") about the Future Combat Systems:
[Higher] echelon commanders could plug into all FCS sensors and gain a complete view of the battlefield using unmanned aerial vehicles and air- or tube-delivered sensors.
And I know I've mentioned various aircraft, drone, balloon, and mast-based surveillance systems in this blog over the years.
But one of my biggest worries about the unblinking eye is what this will do to American troops fighting under a microscope:
How will American soldiers fight when every movement is recorded by surveillance equipment? We are pursuing a transparent battlefield where we see all enemy movement and all friendly movement. We won't get to the former, but we may get pretty good about the latter.
I'm not talking about how we'll fight the battles. I'm not worried about squad leaders on the Potomac. Command and control we will deal with, I think, as long as we are careful. I'm wondering about how we deal with the fact that war is horrible and wretched. No matter what the history books say.
When we have a battlefield where we see all of our troops and record all that they do, how will we treat our soldiers? Even in "good" wars that are universally agreed to be justified, such as World War II, we had our share of criminal actions and mistakes that cost lives. Civilians were killed or abused. Prisoners were shot or robbed or abused. Americans died from incompetent commanders or shoddy equipment or just bad luck.
Our military fights very clean based on any combat standards you want to apply--from a historical basis to a contemporary comparison. But war will never be completely clean. Even police commit crimes and abuse prisoners or detainees. Combat is far more stressful and so our troops will commit crimes or simply make lethal mistakes on occasion. How will we react to this? How will we make sure our troops fight even cleaner and how will we protect out troops from unfair prosecution?
So in 2005, I retained skepticism that we can get a truly transparent battlefield under all circumstances. I still retain that skepticism. We can gain a high degree of transparency in most circumstances withing a reasonable distance of our units. But we can never be sure. And in some restricted terrain, we will have darned little confidence that we can detect what is waiting to kill us.
But I do worry that our side of the battlefield will be so transparent that our troops could be prosecuted unjustly just for fighting. So far our military has kept that information secret, it seems. Will that data always be hidden from hostile eyes?
Theme three is here.
