The article titled If We Run Out of Batteries, This War is Screwed running in the June 2003 issue of Wired talks about the most important, least glamorous part of flighting a modern war: signal corps. They’ve advanced a damn long way since the days of trumpets and semaphore, that’s for damn sure.
Caddell leads the way to one of the shipping containers. Inside, two soldiers baby-sit three rows of Sun servers. “This is where the Global Command and Control System lives,” Caddell says. GCCS – known as “Geeks” to soldiers in the field — is the military’s HAL 9000. It’s an umbrella system that tracks every friendly tank, plane, ship, and soldier in the world in real time, plotting their positions as they move on a digital map. It can also show enemy locations gleaned from intelligence. “We’re in a whole different ball game from the last Gulf war,” Caddell says. “We had a secure network back in ‘91, but the bandwidth wasn’t there and the applications weren’t there. Now they are.”
Quite honestly, the description of the communications technology is almost surreal. You know that the military is taking advantage of the developments of the Internet age and its subsequent revolution in communications, but it’s somehow hard to imagine a bunch of staff officers coming online using Microsoft Chat to communicate during a firefight while sitting in holes in the middle of the desert.
“What’s funny about using Microsoft Chat,” he adds with a sly smile, “is that everybody has to chosen icon to represent themselves. Some of these guys haven’t bothered, so the program assigns them one. We’ll be in the middle of a battle and a bunch of field artillery colonels will come online in the form of these big-breasted blondes. We’ve got a few space aliens, too.”
Of course the system is not without problems. The Iraqi desert is a far-cry from the climate-controlled rooms that most of the equipment being deployed was designed for, so the system starts to break down above 100 degrees. People still get lost in the desert, and there is still fratricide. But this is the future, people, and in the future being able to communicate effectively and transmit large amounts of data back and forth will be as important as missiles and tanks (not to mention being a prerequisite for using missiles and tanks effectively). And if war is going to happen, it’s good to be the best at it, I suppose.
I enjoyed your post, but “And if war is going to happen, it’s good to be the best at it, I suppose.” stikes me as a singularly naive comment.
Left by Matthew B on May 22nd, 2003
Why?
Left by Scott on May 22nd, 2003
‘if war is going to happen’ - in the passive voice. To me that makes it sound as if war is something that has just happened to America, pretty much completely outside its control. Why are all these nasty people attacking us for no reason? Perhaps i’m reading too much into John’s statement.
Left by Matthew B on May 22nd, 2003
Eh, no, I was being pretty facetious with that. I do that a lot. In fact, I’m pretty much as far into the other camp as one can get
But I see what you mean, just taking what I said at face value.
Left by John on May 22nd, 2003
ha sorry then. it is fun to rant anywho. peace!
Left by Matthew B on May 22nd, 2003