Nanomanagement and Planning Vacuums
Noah examines an important question - does increased military communications encourage micromanagement?
It has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the organizational adaptation to that technology. Just because you can contact someone doesn’t mean you necessarily should, nor does it alleviate the importance of training forces in command-by-influence.[The experience of being bombarded by emails immediately second-guessing his choice to medevac some troops] lead Boudreau to conclude that a military network’s real weak point isn’t storage capacity, or bandwidth. “There is a limit to how much a soldier on the ground can convey with the pressures of time, heat, exhaustion, and possibly enemy fire bearing down,” he writes. “Consequently, any tactical picture formed in remote command posts can’t help but obscure the nuances of the peculiar scenarios that patrolling soldiers face on the ground.”
Network theory holds that the network gets stronger with every additional node. And there are countless thousands of examples of that being proven out on military. But on the battlefield, the inverse may sometimes be true, as well.
Part of the whole power of the IT revolution, as applied to business management, has been the ability to gather data automatically without burdening individuals with the task of personally answering data calls and queries. When considering how to organize and train a network-enabled military, we need to remember this.For the monitored, time spent quantifying efforts, writing situation reports or reporting to higher command is time spent off delegated tasks. Furthermore, persistent monitoring reduces the risks taken by subordinates, reducing their discretion and pushing up many decisions once made at their level.
…Now that senior leaders can nanomanage a distant action, when everyone rushes to the sounds of the guns, who is planning, who is thinking, who is directing what will occur when those guns go silent?
UPDATE: John Robb weighs in with his take on the article that kicked all of this off.
