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[infowar.de] Newsweek 03.03.03: Wired For Battle
Infowar.de, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/liste.html
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Newsweek
March 3, 2003
Pg. 32
Wired For Battle
Booting up the FBCB2?American soldiers' best weapon yet for cutting through
the fog of war
By T. Trent Gegax
From the front seat of his scout Humvee, Sgt. Travis Palmer looks out at
the rocky landscape of Fort Hood, Texas. It doesn t seem like there s much
out there but the laptop mounted on his dashboard tells Palmer otherwise.
On the color touchscreen, red and blue icons pinpoint the battlefield
positions of enemies and friendlies. Yellow diamonds mark chemical and
biological bomb-fallout zones. Green lines surround a minefield and a
dotted line reveals a safe bridge through it. Were he to come under attack,
Palmer wouldn t reach for his compass, map and radio a soldier s timeless
tools. He d grab the rubber-coated keyboard at his side and send the
appropriate e-mail to his commander, who d instantly receive his
coordinates and send in reinforcements.
No such danger today. Palmer, a 29-year-old New Yorker with the Army s
First Cavalry Division, is training on the latest in battlefield
communications equipment. In an actual combat situation an invasion of
Iraq, say his commander could forward Palmer s e-mail from the front
straight to Gen. Tommy Franks s in box. It s automatic, says Palmer. I don
t need all kinds of books to find who to send information to. It just makes
my job easier.
Dubbed Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and Below FBCB2 in Army-speak the
Internet-based communications system was beta-tested in Bosnia during the
1990s with promising results. Now it s being rolled out to Army divisions
and select Marine units. It s standard equipment in thousands of Humvees,
tanks and helicopters camped on Iraq s southern and northern doorsteps. The
generals hope that giving soldiers on the ground a near-omniscient view of
the battlefield will help lift the chaotic fog of war that can lead to
mistakes, and friendly fire casualties. The Tactical Internet, as FBCB2 is
called, takes data collected from thousands of Global Positioning Satellite
sensors aboard vehicles and aircraft and integrates them with battlefield
intelligence from a wide range of sources aerial spycraft, roving Green
Berets and CIA agents. The data are continuously updated on the fortified
FBCB2 Web site and beamed to mobile units in the field. E-mail and voice
transmissions provide additional information. In combat, e-mail is said to
be more reliable than voice transmission, which is prone to cross talk and
crashes more often than the Tactical Internet.
The system s backers say it is far more efficient than conventional
battlefield communication. Navigating through a hostile zone, for instance,
can consume 80 percent of a soldier s time. Now, I ve got 80 percent of my
time to talk about how I m going to kill him instead of figuring out where
he is, says Brig. Gen. Robert Durbin, the First Cavalry s assistant
division commander. He can instantly pinpoint to within a few feet a
vehicle traveling 65 miles per hour anywhere on the battlefield. Where a
request for firepower took 10 minutes to process, it now takes five. In
theory, the system may even reduce friendly-fire deaths, which accounted
for a quarter of American fatalities in the first gulf war, by
automatically rejecting calls for fire into known friendly zones. It s as
significant as the evolution we went through when radios were propagated in
the 1930s, says General Durbin.
Even so, some in the military are wary about the prospect of war by Xbox.
Traditionalists fear that computers are no substitute for time-honored
fieldcraft, and warn that putting too much information before soldiers eyes
could cause paralysis: would a tank driver go into shock if his screen
indicated he was surrounded? There are also worries about the potential
vulnerability of the software itself. Early versions were hacked by
testers, and the system s GPS backbone is vulnerable to jamming by small
Russian-made devices, available for about $35,000, which have ranges of
more than 150 miles. The rest of the world knows that the best way to fend
us off is to blow our GPS because we re so dependent upon it, says
Elizabeth Stanley-Mitchell, a security-studies professor at Georgetown
University and a former Army intel officer. Overloading is another problem.
The sheer volume of messages pouring into the system at once could
overwhelm it, slowing the ability to provide real-time updates. While it s
built to withstand the elements including heat up to 140 degrees an errant
shard of shrapnel, or even an accidental elbow blow, would crumple the
screen. And entire portions of the system could be wiped out if the enemy
attacked the program s brains operations centers, established about 12
miles behind the front lines. Technology has limitations and can be
defeated very easily, says Army Col. John Rosenberger, an in-house skeptic
who fears the day when GPS devices replace the compass. But there is a very
large group of influential decision makers within [the Defense Department]
who believe that technology will provide us dominance in the future.
The Tactical Internet s champions say that while it s not perfect, it s an
overdue step into the digital age. And analog navigation had its problems,
after all. One general recalls that during the 1991 gulf war, planners used
double-sided tape to stick friendly icons on acetate maps. Occasionally,
one of the bits fell to the ground and resulted in friendly-fire
casualties. The project s deputy manager, Thomas Plavcan, acknowledges that
given enough energy or deception, the Web page could be hacked. But, he
insists, we ve done a lot of testing on this, and we met the marks. The
system is protected by the strongest encryption available, and each onboard
computer is equipped with an instant self kill mode, which will destroy the
unit if it falls into enemy hands. In two years, Pentagon planners say, the
devices will be compact enough to carry. Their sensors will monitor the
vital statistics of troops and their vehicles (much like the digital dog
tags some troops already wear).
So far, the Army has spent $800 million in development and training to get
the program up and running. The Pentagon will spend an additional $82
million over the next four years. But the future of battlefield computers
may depend on how well, or not, they perform in a war against Iraq. I know
the system works, says Sergeant Palmer, fiddling with the computer in his
Humvee. But I don t know if everyone is fully trained to work it. He may
soon find out.
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