The tech it took to take Baghdad

Thu, 22 May 2003 08:41:00 -0400
/technology

Joshua Davis describes “a dazzling array of technology that signals the arrival of digital warfare” in his awesome Wired article on the tech it took to take Baghdad.

Caddell sketches out a typical scenario: A Special Forces unit in northern Iraq attacks an Iraqi irregular unit. The firefight is recorded with digital video, which is uploaded to GCCS via secure satellite. JOC intelligence officers fire up the Warfighting Web, click through to “Latest Intelligence,” watch the fight, write a summary, and post follow-up orders to the unit. The soldiers either download the orders directly or receive them by radio from the nearest Tactical Operations Center, the most forward command post on the network.

They’re using Microsoft Chat!?

“What’s funny about using Microsoft Chat,” he adds with a sly smile, “is that everybody has to choosean 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.”

How important is the network?

Lieutenant Colonel Mims: “If it’s a question of the network going down, we get helicopters, air support, tanks - whatever we need”

It looks slightly different from the trenches:

There are other problems. “When we were deployed from the States,” says Lieutenant Marc Lewis - the commander of the convoy’s 27 heavy equipment trucks - “they told us that we would be given encrypted, military-issue radios when we got here. When we arrived, they told us we should have brought our own.”

What Lewis brought was four Motorola Talkabouts, each with a range of about 1,000 feet. In the half-dozen convoy trips he’s made since arriving in country, Lewis has taken to distributing a Talkabout to the first and last trucks. The other two go to vehicles at strategic points in between. It’s hardly secure. Anybody with a radio could monitor the conversations.

I give up, there’s too much good stuff in there to quote. Read it. Worryingly little thought seems to have gone into what happens when both sides have this kind of technology.

And Bruce Berkowitz suggests how this can be applied to North Korea, where apparently, they are training hackers.