I’m surprised John Robb hasn’t posted this over on Global Guerillas yet, since it provides a great comparison of the US military’s top-down transformation to the Open Source warfare model practiced by the Iraqi insurgency.

From the Popular Science article, “Winning–and Losing–the First Wired War.”

Compare the United States:

Even in the supposedly wired 4ID, it can take years for frontline soldiers to benefit from the technologies that high-ranking officers quickly take for granted. The finicky, incompatible equipment that’s given to the infantrymen and tank drivers in Charlie Company—the guys who are spending this cold, wet February night on the front—is primitive in comparison with the gear at the sprawling military base outside of Balad, where battalion-level commanders oversee the 300 troops in Charlie and three other companies. There, things are beginning to work like the network-centric theorists predicted, with drone video feeds and sensor data and situation reports flying in constantly. But to the guys in Charlie Company, this technological wizardry and the Pentagon’s futuristic hypotheses seem awfully far away.

There is a simple, but significant, reason why: Bringing frontline infantrymen into the network isn’t as easy as wiring up a headquarters. Battlefield gear has to be wireless, durable, secure, and completely effortless to use in the chaos of combat. The network is slowly expanding to meet the grunts. But the Department of Defense’s lumbering process for buying new equipment still virtually ensures that ground-level soldiers won’t be linked-in until early next decade. “The fog, friction and uncertainty of war are still there, same as always,” says retired Marine Col. T.X. Hammes, considered one of the leading authorities on counterinsurgency. “This net-centricity helps some, but it only goes as far as the battalion [the command echelon above the companies that do the actual fighting]. After that, these guys are on their own.”

to the insurgents:

It’s at this point, just beyond the edge of the American network, where the guerrillas are best connected. Using disposable cellphones, anonymous e-mail addresses at public Internet cafés, and “lessons learned” Web sites that rival Cavnet, disparate guerrilla groups coordinate attacks, share tactics, hire bomb makers, and draw in fresh recruits. It’s an ad hoc, constantly changing web of connections, so it’s hard for U.S. spooks to know where to listen in next. It also lets the insurgents keep a loose command structure, without much hierarchy—just like the network-centric theorists call for. Even if their communications are compromised, only a small cell is exposed, not the entire insurgency. “They’re more effectively networked than we are,” says Hammes, the guerrilla-war expert. “They have a worldwide, secure communications network. And all it cost them was two dinars.”

There’s a certain irony to the fact that even a project intended to let the military operate in “Internet time” ultimately can only move at the speed of the military’s own procurement and program management offices.

Fortunately, the troops themselves are a little more enterprising:

To compensate, some American soldiers are buying their own gear: $50 Motorola walkie-talkies, so they can talk to their squad mates; $160 Garmin GPS receivers to make up for FBCB2’s gaps. It’s quicker than waiting for the wheels of the Pentagon bureaucracy to turn.

What it comes down to is that Command & Control structures which were once too expensive for anyone but national governments can now be built ad-hoc and on-the-cheap. This has significant implications for any state actor which assumes they can exert control based on some monopoly of information.

This is similar to the imbalance in productivity and force effectiveness that eventually caused the Soviet Union to arm itself into collapse trying to defend against NATO. They were spending so much of their GDP building fighters, submarines, and tanks that there was no capacity left for civilian consumption. Unfortunately, I fear that this time around the United States is going to be the one which arms itself into collapse, leaving insurgents with nothing but two dinars and a will to win in our wake.

Image: U.S. Tanks caught in combat in Baghdad, courtesy of Google Maps, originally found on Shii’s Rocky Middle Path.