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Surrendering the initiative? C2 on the digitized battlefield
Military Review, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Jim Dunivan
"Commanders encourage subordinates to act within their intent as opportunities occur. Vision, clear communication of intent, and the command climate create an atmosphere conducive to the exercise of subordinate initiative." (38)
"Commanders at each echelon must precisely state the mission to their subordinate commanders without telling them how to do it." (39)
"Given the expected battlefield conditions, leaders at every level must avoid placing unnecessary limits on their soldiers' freedom of action. The leader at the point of decision must have the knowledge, training, and freedom necessary to make the correct choice in support of the commander's intent. This concept must be emphasized at every opportunity at every level of leadership." (40)
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The Army's most current warfighting doctrine clearly and profoundly advocates use of directive control in battle and in other military operations to establish the best formula for success.
Transformation and Information-Age Warfare
The immediate lessons learned from Operations Just Cause and Desert Storm caused the Army to think about command on the move under conditions of increased battle tempo. Visionary leaders like General Frederick M. Franks expanded this thinking to capture the whole art of command and to introduce the term "battle command" to replace the traditional idea of command and control. (41) Franks wanted to break away from the Cold War associations of staff processes, command post arrangements, and predictable battlefields tied to C2. He wanted to focus on the art of command and battle leadership. Franks understood that the nature of land battle would continue to be tough, brutal, and unpredictable. Land battle would require commanders to be at the front with their troops, not tethered to a command post, to see the dispersed, perhaps noncontiguous, battlefield. (42)
As the Commanding General, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), Franks established battle labs to unite industry, government, academia, and the Army to study and experiment in leveraging information technology to help commanders in battlefield visualization and decision-making. (43) In a letter to TRADOC commanders in February 1993, Franks wrote, "We are at the beginning of a revolution in the way we will command soldiers and tactical units in battle. The work done at all our [battle labs], in addition to the Battle Command Battle Lab, is vital to this. We do not have answers and that is why we have set ourselves up to experiment. I am convinced we are in a transition in battle command now with info age technology as significant as back in the 1920s when we went from flag sets to wireless radios to combined arms to upbeat tempo." (44) Thus began the pursuit of battlefield digitization and Information-Age warfare.
Most early doctrine defined information warfare as actions taken to achieve information superiority by affecting adversary information, information-based processes, and information systems, while defending one's own. Over the years, interpretations of Information-Age warfare have included mass media and its relationship with military operations; precision weaponry; electronic warfare; and psychological operations. While these are all valid aspects of Information-Age warfare, the most relevant to the scope of this article is C2 warfare. (45)
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