IT Cuts Both Ways
Sometime in 2010, my colleagues and I at the Military Studies Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, started a blog. Looking over some of the old material, I thought this post has best stood the test of time.
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It’s undeniable how important technology is to this whole exercise of military transformation, or the revolution in military affairs (RMA). In case we’ve forgotten, the RMA was initially referred to by the Soviets as a "military-technical revolution". True, we acknowledge the other crucial elements in the process of transformation, such as organisational processes, culture, structures and so forth. But really, technology truly stands out if for no other reasons than tangibility, visibility, glamour even, and the sheer amount of money spent on acquiring sophisticated C4ISR and weapon systems. Look no further than the recruitment ads for the armed forces, and see the extent to which technology takes centre stage.
For me, the crux of the RMA actually consists more in the sensing, communications and computing technologies rather than the weaponry. In other words, it is information technology (IT) that drives military transformation, if simply because you have to see it first before you can shoot it. The by-now familiar concepts of joint operations, network-centric warfare (NCW), systemic operational design (unfortunately known as SOD), and effects-based operations (EBO) and so forth are made possible by information technology, rather than advances in munitions and ballistics.
But the emphasis on IT comes with a price: IT cuts both ways. In transforming the way the armed forces does things, IT is at the same time transforming the armed forces organisation itself. The same networking technology that calls for assigning greater autonomy to the soldier on the ground is also the same technology that allows the soldier’s superior to micro-manage him to an extent never before thought possible. This has been referred to as the 1000-mile screw driver that as good as enables an arm-chair general to essentially call the play ("soldier number two, move 12 metres to the left"). While IT in the armed forces promises the "strategic corporal", it also produces the "tactical general".
I would go even further and argue that far from flattening the armed forces organisation, such technologies instead reinforce the twin rationales of discipline and punishment (to borrow from Foucault) that form the basis of military life and organisation. Foucault uses the concept of disciplinary power to explain how the anticipation of control and punishment causes people to engage in self-surveillance. Stan Deetz extends this idea by arguing how power, discipline and sanction are embedded in all aspects of social practices and organisational lives, expressed and reconstructed constantly in the interactions between people. The power to discipline and punish, therefore, does not simply reside in particular sites of authority in society or an organisation; rather, that power is all pervasive in that it permeates the complex set of practices that frame common sense, shared experiences, and personal and collective identity.
For an armed forces organisation, which runs on rules, standard operating procedures, and the punishment of deviations from rules, the ability to "see all, hear all" actually reinforces the conservative, risk-averse, top-down, authority-driven, hierarchical structure of the military. Attempts to create a culture of innovation, which is inherently risky and involves testing the rules, backfire because organisational members start to "second guess" themselves because they feel (or think they feel) the gaze of inspection on them all the time.
Bentham’s 18th century idea of the Panoptican – a single tower in a prison yard that enables the prison warden to monitor every prisoner’s behaviour – is a particularly salient one for the armed forces that is in the throes of transformation. The Panoptican works on the principle that while the prison guard can see what all the prisoners are doing, the prisoners cannot see what the prison guard is doing; because of this asymmetry, the prisoners cannot know if they are being watched, and therefore behave in the desired way in case they are being watched. In other words, they engage in self-surveillance, which results in the reproduction of established behaviour. Replace "Panoptican" with "information technology" and "battlespace awareness", and "prisoners" with "soldiers on the ground", and you get where I am headed with this. The same technology that enables surveillance of the enemy – the ‘S’ in ‘C4ISR’ – also enables surveillance of members of your own organisation. Worse, the anticipation of surveillance by superiors results in self-surveillance, self-monitoring, and a growing reluctance to improvise, innovate and take risks, in short, to deviate from the rules.
Stephen Ambrose, in Band of Brothers, wrote that while the army cannot always control the things you do, it can always make you regret doing the things you were not supposed to do. Now, with information (disciplinary) technologies, military commanders get to do both. And that’s not always a good thing as far as promoting innovation and adaptability is concerned.