Okay, I don’t want you to miss this next part, so scoot that leather chair up close to the screen for a minute. MASS IS RELATIVE! When I wrote about decisive mass, it meant something different at Jena-Auerstedt than it does today. I’m dead and I understand that. What’s your excuse?
Yes, I've been on this for a long time as I wrote in 2000*, quoting proposals within the Navy:
Under network-centric warfare, the United States Navy will fight in a completely new environment. Forces with the characteristics of "speed, precision, and reach [will] achieve the massing of effects versus the massing of forces."
And I broached this in 1996 in this Land Warfare Paper:
If we can harness the potential of information dominance, we will allow the Army to exploit its training and equipment advantages to create a fast and agile force whose flexibility and firepower stun an enemy by massing effort against weak points.
Information dominance would allow a networked Army to move troops and concentrate firepower at the decisive point. I was perhaps too imprecise a quarter century ago, but my mention of "massing effort" was meant to be in contrast to massing just troops. But by 2000 the Navy proposal had focused my language.
You mass effects. Once that required massing troops and cannons (or in the case of seapower, platforms) at the decisive point. It's been a long time since we fought shoulder-to-shoulder and wheel-to-wheel. Deal with that shift in reality and stop missing the point.
*And not that I dwell on it, but I was new to writing back then and didn't realize I should have been prodding the Proceedings editors to publish the article they paid me for. I thought that if they paid me they intended to publish. Surely it would be rude to ask them if they were going to get around to printing it in my lifetime. I learned my lesson.
