It is hard to argue with this:
Overall, the vastly increased situational awareness that comes with sensor proliferation can reduce the effects of the fog of war for military commanders and politicians, ideally allowing for smarter military decision-making. Especially in potential military action against less capable opponents, but to some degree even in peer-to-peer conflicts, this level of information-based overmatch could help reduce the uncertainty of military operations. The availability of information could even preemptively restrain some actors from engaging in high-risk operations. On the flip side, access to a near-complete intelligence picture would also encourage military action when decisionmakers perceive a clear advantage — and this could lull the overly confident into a false sense of security.
But just before this, the author says:
As sensor technology proliferates, the defense industry is also developing weapons, technologies and tactics to counter its effects. The very concept of sensor proliferation provides a great degree of resilience to such counters in the form of redundancy; a vast distributed network of individual sensor platforms is difficult for an opponent to physically destroy. However, the common networking and processing infrastructure is a much more likely target for disruption.
I guess I maintain a healthy respect for the people being observed to avoid the observation. I said as much more than two decades ago in this Land Warfare Paper:
As we seek information dominance through satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles and the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), which promise near realtime knowledge of troop dispositions, we must remember that they cannot look into an enemy's mind. Nor can they ensure that we will not misinterpret the data because of preconceived notions or that we will refuse to accept information that contradicts what everyone "knows" about enemy capabilities or intentions.
Will we really see everything? Will we really know what seeing even everything means?
I don't have confidence that modern version of camo nets (and there are modern versions of literal camo nets coming, too) and inflatable tanks won't deceive persistent surveillance long enough to gain an advantage.
I don't have confidence that our enemies won't be able to hack into our network of sensors or the fusion systems to display a battlefield deployment that looks real as Hell but is in fact a high tech virtual reality that could confuse our interpretation and decision making. How long would it take an enemy to exploit even a short-term situational awareness fraud? And wouldn't emphasis on getting inside an enemy's decision-making (OODA) loop make it more likely that we will fall for transient deception?
And I am not confident that we will be able to extend persistent and effective surveillance everywhere even if we can secure it, as I noted in that LWP:
Although it is possible that information dominance could extend our superiority in open warfare to urban areas, that breakthrough has not happened. We must not forget that urban conditions may limit our technological and training advantages, lest we experience our own Khorramshahr debacle one day.
With increased urbanization, that potential hole in our surveillance networks will be increasingly significant. Although I am conflicted by that battlefield.
Nor am I confident that humans with preconceived notions will interpret even accurate information accurately in a timely fashion. Again, how long would a commander have to cling to a preconceived notion in defiance of reality for an enemy to seriously exploit that failure?
There is a danger in believing we have dispelled the fog of war when all we will have done is change the form of the fog.
