‘Thinking System’ Replaces the Destructive Mindless Warrior : What we’re seeing is a revolutionary infusion of knowledge into violence.

The late Maj. Gen. Don Morelli of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, and his superior, four-star Gen. Donn A. Starry, who is now retired, were among the designers of Third Wave battle doctrine. Indeed, Gen. Starry, who preceded Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf as the head of what is now Central Command, once described his mission as converting the U.S. Army “from a Second Wave to a Third Wave fighting force.” Today, nearly a decade later, Third Wave warfare has actually arrived.

In Third Wave war, as in Third Wave wealth creation, time is even more crucial than in the past because events are accelerative, demanding faster decisions, instant communication and instant response. In the economy, the old rule was “time is money.” In the new economy, each interval is worth more money than the last.

An analogous principle applies to Third Wave war. Timing was always important in war. But now speed and movement are all--thus the extreme emphasis on rapid deployment, mobility, maneuver, surprise and interdiction, rather than the slow, grinding frontal collision of forces.

In air-land battle doctrine it takes an extremely high level of coordination to bring together air, ground and naval forces, not to mention space-based surveillance and control systems, integrating front-line action and behind-the-lines strikes. Instead of fighting a traditional war measured in captured land, the war is choreographed in time. Commanders know that if a bridge or highway is destroyed the effects will be felt at the battle front a predictable number of hours or minutes later.

(The emphasis on precise timing, Morelli had told us in 1981, required a fundamental change in the thinking of field commanders. It had to become more future-oriented in order to anticipate the impacts of interdiction; it had to emphasize maneuver and mobility over static positions, and, above all, it had to integrate air and land operations as never before. All of this requires incredible orchestration.)

Early forecasts about the ground war in the Gulf were filled with mistaken assumptions based on linear extrapolations from earlier wars. It is not simply the air war that is revolutionary. The same goes for the allied ground war based on doctrines outlined, developed and trained for over more than a decade. Even after the start of the ground offensive, comparisons were made to the German blitzkrieg of World War II. This analogy, too, is mistaken. What has been acted out on the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq was so precision-planned, so tightly integrated, so dependent on instant communication, that no previous war offers appropriate comparison. None of this guarantees future victories like that in the Gulf. Carl von Clausewitz’s famous frictions and fogs of war still confound and confuse troops in battle. But the entire process has been transformed.

Third Wave war, like the Third Wave economy, is knowledge-driven. “We have a lot of computers,” says Lt. Gen. Charles A. Horner, the U.S. air commander in the Gulf, sounding not unlike a corporate information officer, “and you can bring together the tens of thousands of minute details--radio frequencies, altitudes, tanker rendezvous, bomb configurations, who supports who, who’s flying escort--there’s just thousands and thousands of details.”

Detail must be matched with exquisite precision. In Third Wave industry, engineers can divide space into fractions of a micron and time into nanoseconds. So too, military planners now think in terms of ever-more precise targeting. And as in industry, precision eliminates waste. By being able to locate an artillery target precisely, rather than by successive approximation, as in the past, fewer shells need to be fired to destroy it.

In Vietnam, an American M-60 tank crew had to find cover, stop the tank and aim before it could fire. At 2,000 yards, at night, the chances of hitting a target were, according to tank-war expert Ralph Hallenbeck, “pretty nil.” Today, the crew of an M-1 can fire without stopping. Night-vision aids, lasers and computers that automatically correct for heat, wind and other conditions ensure that they will score a hit nine out of 10 times.

All weapons have limitations and all technologies can fail. Nevertheless, the directions of change are clear; on the ground as well as in the air and in space, precision and speed are the keys to success.

“What’s making all this work,” says James F. Digby, a RAND Corp. expert on precision weaponry, are “weapons based on information instead of the volume of firepower. It reduces greatly the tonnage of explosives you have to ship over.” His words echo those of business managers who use computers to cut raw-material waste and miniaturize products, while slashing inventory and transportation costs.

During the Vietnam War, tactical aircraft were able to drop their bombs or missiles within 500 feet of a target only 50% of the time. Today, that has declined to about 20 feet and far less in some cases.

Collateral damage, including civilian casualties and occasional deaths from friendly fire, are all inevitable in warfare, and will no doubt never be completely eliminated. But the new mode of warfare clearly minimizes “wasteful” destruction.

“It’s the triumph of silicon over steel,” said John E. Pike of the Federation of American Scientists. Computer chips make it possible to manage the increased logistical complexity made necessary by more differentiated weapons systems and more specialized fighting units. As in the economy, more varied technologies require more diversified skills and a more refined military division of labor. In both economic production and military destruction, this growing differentiation of missions, tools and organizational units increases the amount of information that must be gathered, processed and exchanged.

Just as satellites now help trucking and rail firms pinpoint the location of cargo, Navstar satellites give pilots, naval officers and tank commanders instant navigational data with precision down to 100 feet. This stream of information can be automatically fed to “smart” weapons speeding toward their targets.

No one who viewed the television coverage can forget the deadly accuracy with which intelligent bombs and cruise missiles sought out the main air shaft in the Iraqi air force headquarters or the actual entryway of an enemy missile bunker.

And just as the economy demands more and more highly trained workers, Third Wave war requires knowledgeable soldiers. In the words of a U.S. Air Force pilot and public relations officer: “The weapons are only as smart as the people using them.” Years of expensive training and millions of dollars lie behind every F-15 pilot. And that pilot is never alone in the cockpit. He is part of an interacting system backed up by radar operators in AWAC airplanes providing early warning of an enemy approach, by electronic warfare and counter-warfare experts on the ground and in the air, by planning and intelligence officers, by data analysts and telecommunications personnel. As in business, the ratio of “mind workers” to “muscle workers” is growing constantly.

In the Gulf, two military “modes” faced one another. The Iraqi forces, especially after most of their radar and surveillance was excised, were a conventional “military machine.” Machines are the technology of the Second Wave era, powerful but “stupid.” By contrast, the allied force was not a machine, but a system with far greater internal feedback, communication and self-regulatory adjustment capability. It was, in fact, a Third Wave “thinking system” right down to the lowest-ranked soldiers. Mindless warriors are to Third Wave war what unskilled laborers are to the Third Wave economy--a vanishing species.

Moreover, the entire battle system has been altered dramatically by the addition of space to the traditional regimes of land, sea and air. Advanced Third Wave economies depend heavily on satellite-based media, data communication, weather and navigational services. But Third Wave military functions are even more space-dependent for arms-control verification, early warning, precision targeting and a host of other functions. The integration of space into combined operations produces a combinatorial leap in the complexity of war. Business management has grown more complex as the economy has moved beyond its smokestack stage. Third Wave battlefield management makes even the most complicated business seem simple.

In short, for anyone who has closely observed changes in business and the economy as the technologically advanced nations have moved beyond their Second Wave assembly lines, the new mode of warfare should not come as a surprise. It is the military mirror of changes in the economy and society, very much like the changes that occurred when the First and Second waves, the agricultural and industrial revolutions, transformed warfare. And, as in the past, some of the techniques and tools developed for war feed back into the economy, stimulating and accelerating the transition to the new knowledge-driven system for wealth creation.

In sum, the rise of a knowledge-based economy is paralleled, and in turn accelerated, by the shift toward knowledge-based war. Third Wave violence is the extension of the mind, not of the fist.

This then takes us to the future of warfare. What happens to older war forms when a new one arises?

The answer is clear. They do not disappear. First Wave handcrafts did not vanish when Second Wave mass production became the dominant form of wealth creation. And mass production will not disappear when Third Wave high-tech de-massified production becomes dominant. Older economic forms survive as subordinate forms within the advanced economy. In fact, different economies can best be described in terms of the mix of forms within them. The same is true for war and armies.

Even in the Gulf conflict, the world’s first predominantly Third Wave war, Second Wave warfare was waged as well. This was seen in the carpet bombing of Iraq’s Republican Guard shock troops by America’s 30-year-old B-52 bombers. This massive use of relatively undifferentiated destruction parallels the bombing in Vietnam at a time when mass production and mass destruction still went hand in hand.

The bloody collision of massed ground forces using Second Wave conventional weapons will continue to be a feature of war so long as low-tech, low-precision weapons, and “stupid” rather than “smart” tanks and artillery continue to fill the arsenals of poor and angry nations.

The future will provide all too many opportunities for First Wave hand-to-hand combat too. The soldier behind a bayonet, the troops crawling through a field of fire to face an enemy in hand-to-hand combat, urban and guerrilla warfare--close-in killing in all its hideous forms--will no doubt be a part of war as long as wars are fought.

Every large-scale conflict will be distinguished by a characteristic combination of these war forms. Put differently, each war or battle will have its own “wave formation” according to how the three types of conflict are combined.

In the Gulf War, we saw coalition forces armed and trained for Third Wave operations opposed by Iraqi troops armed and trained in Second Wave operations. On a larger scale, the development of Third Wave war-fighting capabilities by the United States and NATO severely undercut the Soviet Union’s Second Wave conventional forces and its emphasis on mass production of low-tech weapons.

For all these reasons, merely to describe the Gulf War as a “high-tech war” or the “triumph of air power” is to trivialize what really happened. It is not simply the use of quantitatively better technology, but a truly revolutionary infusion of knowledge into violence, forcing changes in organization, training, tactics, battlefield management, intelligence and timing, along with fundamental reconceptualizations of the relative roles of firepower, mobility, logistics, combat effectiveness values, time, space and communications. It forces a reconceptualization of ideas like “defense” and “total war.” It will ultimately alter the ratio of volunteer to conscript forces, the relationship of the military to civil society and every other dimension of military life--and death.

In short, the arrival of Third Wave warfare will force military planners the world over to rethink everything they have done to date--to cope with the deepest revolution in warfare since the industrial revolution. The specific “wave formation” of military forces and of the wars they wage will rewrite the history of tomorrow.

War will never again be the same.