“There is still another factor that can bring military action to a standstill: imperfect knowledge of the situation.  The only situation a commander can know fully is his own; his opponent’s he can know only from unreliable intelligence.  His evaluation, therefore, may be mistaken and can lead him to suppose that the initiative lies with the enemy when in fact it remains with him…Men are always more inclined to pitch their estimate of the enemy’s strength too high than too low, such is human nature.  Bearing this in mind, one must admit that partial ignorance of the situation is, generally speaking, a major factor in delaying the progress of military action…” On War by Carl von Clausewitz

This concept paper discusses information superiority.   The focus is first on gaining an understanding of the general ideas behind information superiority and then proceeding to a technological forecast of what the U.S. military could require meeting information superiority needs for Transformation.  The goal of continuing identification and improvement in technology and its enhancing action on thinking, planning, and decision-making is to ensure the United States keeps its advantages over current and anticipated adversary capabilities.  These advantages though, will fluctuate in upcoming struggles for technological and intellectual superiority far into the future because adversaries are becoming intellectually and technically smarter with the passage of time.

Environment

Any discussion of a complex concept like Information Superiority has to address causal underpinnings.  In this discussion of Information Superiority, the underpinnings are fourfold – information technology, nature of future conflicts, asymmetric warfare, and Knowledge Warfare.   It comes as no secret that information technology has changed the world.  People can instantly communicate from anywhere in the world through the Internet, and use personal computers to collect and manipulate information and knowledge in stunningly prodigious quantities.  More importantly, people learn from the Internet by accessing libraries, entering chat rooms, and collaborating with other people to solve problems.  Of course learning, such as making bombs, hacking, building biological and nuclear weapons, and exploiting the intricacies of societies are negative outcomes of such a wonderful learning tool.  In a nefarious sense, the Internet and PCs have empowered small groups of people and individuals to coordinate and synchronize terrorism, criminal activities, and drug operations around the world at the speed of light.  To many of our future adversaries, distance and time are no longer constraints thanks to the Internet.   But to the armed forces of the United States, which has to move people and equipment over long distances, time and distance are critical parts of any deployment strategy.

The nature of future conflict doesn’t bode well for the United States.  Arguably, the United States has the best conventional armed forces in the world – nobody now or in the short-term future will be capable of challenging the country’s military in a conventional sense.  But these conventional forces, with their force on force prowess, are experiencing an increasingly complex identity crisis.  While these forces will remain important for the sake of deterrence and are a “must have” capability in the event of a conventional challenge, only the very dumb opponent will choose to compete with the United States in a force on force situation similar to the Desert War.  With that said, people haven’t stopped hating the United States or being envious of its strengths.   Thus, opponents of the United States will undoubtedly choose to compete often in dimensions of national power other than military.   That is, they will undoubtedly focus their efforts on creating desired effects (outcomes) with both military and non-military activities or in some cases combining the two.

Opponents of the United States will choose to compete in economic, financial, political, and social spheres of influence, along with the military sphere.   They will seek offsets against the conventional power of the United States military and the multitude of advantages that such power brings.  They will seek and use approaches that lead directly and indirectly to affecting the country’s will. These opponents will employ all available weapons, and they will neither fight nor compete fairly (from a western perspective).  In this type of competition, there will be no sanctuary, as there has been in the past.   Often conflict will be in the invisible, digital, cyber-world.  Adding to confusion inherent to a chaotic world our adversaries could very well possess objectives and goals very different from ours – so different that we could fail to recognize them.

Asymmetric Warfare

Any analysis of Information Superiority at the start has to consider facing an intelligent, learning, and adaptive foe armed with the strategies and tools of asymmetric warfare.   Assymetric warfare in the context of this chapter is -- strategy, tactics, and tools a weaker adversary uses to seek offsets against a stronger adversary by attacking vulnerabilities, using indirect approaches to the adversary’s vital functions or locations, and seeking advantages for gain.  Adversaries who enter asymmetric warfare have a variety of tools to employ ranging from computer network attack to traditional terrorism to the use of weapons of mass effect (WME).  Asymmetric adversaries will be learning, adapting, and evolving over time.  They will grow to be formidable.  These adversaries understand the direct and obvious linkage between decisions and will.   Clearly, asymmetric adversaries of the future have as their aim to influence the will of the people of the United States by affecting the decision-making of its body politic, military, and political leadership.

With the presence of these smart, adaptive, and learning adversaries, combatants in any conflict will quickly that the condition of Information Superiority is neither a given state of affairs nor a lasting state of being.  Instead, information superiority fluctuates, based on act, react, and counteract cycles of interaction with a smart, adaptive adversary.  Whoever controls this all-important condition will go far toward satisfying objectives and making faster and better decisions than the opponent. 

Adversaries of the future are becoming increasingly adaptive, learning, and co-evolving (changing and adapting to their environment).  In addition, they are becoming technology smart and organized.  Undoubtedly, they have performed an analysis on how to compete with the United States without self-destructing. In most situations, they will choose to engage the United States by using asymmetric strategies in which a weaker foe seeks offsets by attacking vulnerabilities of the stronger opponent, often using indirect approaches.  Asymmetric tools flow from this line of thinking and include: information operations (IO), focused weapons of mass effects (WME), non-lethal weapons (NLW), commercial off the shelf technology such as GPS busters and RF radiation machines, terrorism (traditional and non-traditional), swarming, and the like.  Even more insidious though, our opponents of the future will engage the United States in Knowledge Warfare.

Knowledge Warfare will form the underlying foundation of future conflict.   At the heart of Knowledge Warfare lies the philosophy that advantages accrue to the side with the knowledge and decision-making capabilities to make decisions better and faster than their opponents do.   Knowledge Warfare is an abstract but very real struggle with an adversary to gain valuable knowledge for the distinct purpose of making better and faster decisions than the adversary – a decision advantage.   Sometimes, this competition for decision advantage involves only one person – but such a situation is the exception, not the rule.   More commonly, adversaries try to affect the decisions of an aggregation of people who constitute a decision-making apparatus.  Decision advantage enables one side to take actions superior to their opponent thereby leading to other types of advantages – e.g., intellectual, knowledge, technology, positional, and action advantages.  Decision advantage is arguably the most important advantage, as it provides entrée into setting tempo, and gaining and sustaining initiative and momentum – so important for winning in any military situations throughout history.

At a higher level of abstraction, decision-making is the most important aspect involved in affecting the will of opponents. As long as mankind has engaged in conflict, affecting will has been a preeminent goal.  Will, even in its most abstract and intangible state, is the energy, sacrifice, resolve, long-term perseverance and collective desire of people to win or triumph over their foes.  Affecting the decisions and decision-making apparatus of adversaries provides the path toward influencing an individual’s, organization’s, or country’s will.  Its influence is far-reaching ranging from soldiers at the tactical level to aggregates of population and senior decision-makers at a strategic level.

Making decisions decidedly better than an adversary’s doesn’t happen by accident.  To the true artist of Knowledge Warfare, information superiority is a condition enabling the effects of superior decisions to come into being.  Information superiority is only a temporary condition though, as smart, adaptive, learning adversaries in a competition quickly adjust and seek this condition’s benefits.   It follows that the condition of information superiority will be seriously and aggressively sought by both sides in a competition for the benefits forthcoming in the realm of making decisions superior to the adversary.

The country’s military establishment has publicly stated in the speeches of its leaders and doctrine that Information Superiority is the key enabler in seeking, finding, and sustaining dominance over its future opponents.  Joint Vision 2020 says along this line of thought, “These changes in the information environment make Information Superiority a key enabler of the transformation of the operational capabilities of the joint force and the evolution of joint command and control.”[1]  Curiously, such an important document has a watered down definition of Information Superiority, which is – “the capability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or denying an adversary’s ability to do the same.”[2]

From thinking about the definition of Information Superiority, one has to start asking questions such as: What exactly is Information Superiority?  How does one know when it is found, achieved, sustained, and lost?  Is Information Superiority everywhere and all the time?  Or, is it localized and episodic owing to the intellectual and technical capabilities of opponents?   What does possessing Information Superiority provide by way of advantage? I ask these questions because people reading JV 2020 can easily end up being confused by the vagueness of its definition of information superiority.   Its words are imprecise, the definition pertains to processes, and it doesn’t tie to arguably the most important aspects of Information Superiority – perpetual struggles for advantages in decisions and favorable situations in tempo, initiative, and momentum.  In my view a much more meaningful and functional definition of Information Superiority is:

The use of information technology (IT) and intellectual power to create conditions to make better and faster decisions than an adversary.  Better, faster decisions provide advantages of tempo, initiative and momentum against an enemy or opponent at a time and place of the commander’s choosing, with the notion of creating conditions leading to the effects most conducive to rapid mission accomplishment and sustainment of advantage, with minimal costs.

Information superiority is an elusive, changing condition that enables people to make decisions more quickly and faster than their opponents – decision advantage.  What then, are the key elements of Information Superiority?  In my view how people process information (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic), think, and turn their thought into decisions and action are the most important aspects.   But, data, information, knowledge, understanding, and decisions are elements that provide the capabilities to process, think, and decide.  But, these “elements” do not stand alone – there must be software and hardware interfaces conjoining man and machine and cognitive skills (machine and human) to make sense out of information, find its patterns and relationships, and find knowledge.

A purposeful transformation process, involving automated machines and people turns data into information.  People have to seek and find data, and transform it through processing and software applications into information.  Information becomes knowledge when skilled people provide value to an issue or problem by way of thought, experience, intuition, and creativity.  Knowledge can be powerful in isolation but becomes extraordinary when it combines with other knowledge enabling patterns and relationships to become known and available for use.  This process involves the mental function of synthesis.  Understanding, a precursor to making effective and timely decisions, comes from recognizing and exploiting obvious and disparate relationships comprising the tangible and intangible aspects of any given situation.

The word “advantage” suggests that one side or one person or one country has a favorable situation relative to their antagonist.  The advantage in the context of this paper lies co-mingled with individual and collective brain power, with information technology, information, knowledge and their contributions to decision-making, hence actions.  Information and knowledge though aren’t dead words – they have vibrancy.  They come to life when information and knowledge are used to make decisions and act.  In this context knowledge isn’t power – it’s the means to power.  Some leader has to make a decision to act or decide not to act with the knowledge at hand to enable what was knowledge to become power.  The underlying lesson for all human beings is the importance of striving to do something with knowledge that will create a lasting advantage.  It follows that what is truly important in any competitive struggle is what people or machines (someday) do with information to turn it into knowledge, manage that knowledge so people can use it, think, and make decisions faster and better than their competitor.

Given that the future environment the United States faces is one of struggle, conflict, or competition, the essence of Information Superiority lies in finding or creating advantage.  As discussed before, advantage is a relative term implying a favorable relationship in a contest between two sides in a competition.  A dynamic comes into play very quickly.  One side in a conflict attempts to find, use, and sustain advantage.   In the meantime, the other side is not paralyzed.  They seek ways to combat their disadvantage and find ways to regain the advantage.  Achieving advantage could also be as simple as creating a disadvantage in a capability of the adversary.  The smart participant in a conflict understands that advantage is short-lived owing to the capability of the opponent to learn, adjust, adapt, and change.  Thus, at the heart of the concept, intense interaction fluctuates aperiodically -- sometimes over space, sometimes over time, sometimes over both domains.

Decisions, to be effective, involve taking advantageous action, anticipating environmental and opponent actions and counter actions, adapting to the environment, and protecting against the counteraction of the adversary.  These activities are in relation to a thinking, adapting, and learning adversary who seeks to obtain the same advantages.  Thus, people can see or feel the force of the abstract yet real struggles for decision dominance – this is neither an easy process nor a given state of being in any contest.

When thinking seriously, several types of advantage seem pertinent to the subject we are investigating.  I have already mentioned the age-old advantages of a fast tempo and gaining and maintaining momentum and initiative over an adversary.  More specifically, adversaries seek advantage in several domains – decisions, intellects (thinking), knowledge (which includes knowledge management -- how to use knowledge), technology, position, and action.

A first kind of advantage, and to my way of thinking the most important, lies in decision-making.   Foes in a competitive activity try to make better decisions than their opponent – this provides decision advantage.  Finding and using decision-advantage provides a capability to seek and find other types of advantage. The worth of decisions is relative to the opponent’s decision-making.  That is, the objective in a competitive situation is to make more timely and better decisions than an opponent.  The most desirous situation involves sustaining decision advantage over time.

A second type of advantage lies in intellect.  That is, one side has the distinct advantage over the other side in how well they think.  People can develop a state of intellectual superiority over their opponent meaning they can think and plan better.  Moreover, with superior thinking and planning comes the potential for decision advantage.  Intellectual advantage provides one of the crucial inputs for decision advantage.  Intellectual advantage comes with the threefold thrusts of training and education (to improve thought processes), technology (to process, manipulate, see, hear, feel emotion, and visualize information and knowledge) and access to information and knowledge relevant to the contest at hand.  This advantage is perhaps the most difficult to sustain because of the growing capabilities of humans (opponents) to learn, innovate, create, change, adapt, and develop and to use readily available information technology to find information and knowledge and to think.

As a third type of advantage, having a knowledge advantage provides the means to gaining decision advantage.  The capability to use knowledge as a lever for gaining entrée into the mental domains of know, understand, decide, and act is often crucial in a competition, particularly if opponents are evenly matched.  Thus, the way people organize, seek, process, analyze, synthesize, and protect information and knowledge becomes an advantage.  It follows that as an implication, the concept of knowledge management constitutes a critical way to achieve this advantage.  Knowledge management is the purposeful and systematic retrieval, processing, organizing, analyzing, synthesizing, and sharing of data, information, and knowledge among knowledge workers, decision-makers, and organizations.

A fourth type of advantage lies in technology.  The side with the technological advantage often has the potential to make better decisions than the opponent.  In addition, the side with technological advantage, with good organization, thinking, management, and decision-making, has the potential to seek, find, and sustain advantage in the tools of information and war.  In essence, technology advantage helps people make better decisions than their adversaries and provides the means for achieving superior maneuverability in which positional advantage becomes possible.  Technology advantage also provides the means to protect better.  It allows adversaries to kill and destroy better with more precision than in the past.   Adversaries know more and can transform data into information and information into knowledge with a technological advantage.   Moreover, technology helps people communicate faster, more clearly, and more effectively than opponents with inferior technology.

A fifth type of advantage lies in position.  Positional advantage in a conventional military sense enables one side to seize the initiative, control the tempo of an operation, and seize and sustain the momentum.  Positional advantage comes from two perspectives.  From a traditional perspective, holding the high ground or a key bridge was tantamount to outright victory owing to the opponent’s bad positioning and attendant decision-making disadvantage.  As an example, Lee was in a position of positional inferiority at Gettsyburg, as he had to attack a well-entrenched enemy who occupied high ground.  Meade was in a position of superiority in that he occupied the high ground and could shift forces using interior lines of communication.  From a non-traditional perspective, adversaries will seek to attain positional advantage in cyber-space.  The soldiers of cyber space – cyber bots – will gain positional advantage along “avenues of approach” read fiber optics, and “key terrain” read switches, modems, routers, hard disk drives, and databases.  Positional advantage could mean placing a logic bomb in an adversary’s database management system ready to inject bad code into the database on command or at a specified time.  Positional advantage in cyber-space could mean cyber-bots are positioned most effectively to discern the opponent’s reconnaissance and attacking cyber-bots.  Positional advantage in cyber-space could also mean an intelligent agent being placed inside the firewalls and intrusion detection systems of an adversary thereby allowing for a read on the decision planning and logic of an adversary without the opponent being aware of the penetration.

A Sixth type of advantage lies in action.  Action is the execution of power.  That is, knowledge is the means to the power that flows from decisions and action.  Information technology provides data and converts it into information.   Knowledge workers turn information into knowledge with their mental attributes.  Knowledge is only potential power that becomes actual power when thinking, decisions, and ensuing actions occur.  Superior knowledge, decisions, thinking and planning, and information technology give commanders freedom of maneuver and initiative.

When one side combines all these advantages they can find wisdom – it is the essence of what military professionals desire when seeking Information Superiority.  With wisdom, military leaders gain insights into the adversary’s actions, intentions, and goals.   Moreover, leaders gain the same level of understanding about the friendly side.  Over the course of time in military affairs, the military genius had wisdom.  Many others sought it, but only a few found it.  Now, with many people linked in collaborative networks, tremendous capabilities in Information Technology, and the capability to learn over the Internet, the possibility of achieving wisdom is real and attainable.

As we pull these threads together into the beginning of a pattern, people have to accomplish several things to create the condition of Information Superiority.

·        Seek relative, timely, specific, and accurate data, information, and knowledge.

·        Initiate the transformation process – data to information to knowledge to understanding.

·        Use knowledge and understanding to make a decision – to act or not to act.

·        Understand that opponents are doing the same thing

·        Send the decision to individuals and organizations that act.

·        Seek feedback to provide measurement of the effectiveness of the decision and actions that flow from it.

·        Send intelligence collection to find information relative to the adversary’s attempt to receive feedback on their decision.

It follows that military strategic thinkers and planners need to make the assertion that any advantage will be temporary owing to learning, adapting organisms constituting our opponents of future chaotic environments.  As an implication, the military establishment needs an automated system in which collection provides inputs sufficient for measuring and displaying the condition of the rapidly fluctuating condition of information superiority.  Additionally, since the best and latest information technology is, for the most part, available to anyone on the commercial market, opponents of the future will have information as good as the U.S. military.  It’s quite safe to assume that over the next ten years the specificity, accuracy, timeliness, and relevancy of information and knowledge our adversaries produce will rival the best our military can find or create.

Thus, the United States military has to possess the best ways to collect, process, manage, manipulate, fuse, integrate, visualize, hear, feel, collaborate, and actually use data, information, and knowledge in automated decision-making environments, and present information and knowledge better than any potential foe.   Leaders then have to use the art and science of decision-making to make decisions faster and better than their adversaries.  It is through a combination of technologies and intellectual power that United States can hope to sustain an edge in upcoming struggles for finding, achieving, and sustaining Information Superiority.  As a given, Information Superiority will be difficult to achieve and maintain.  Its ascendancy and any degree of sustainment will require great intellectual and technological efforts.

“A Way” To View The Parts Comprising Information Superiority

The medium not only controls how things are communicated but what things are communicated. 

Marshall McLuhan

The new operating environment I have discussed argues for changing domains of conflict.  Heretofore, domains have included air, ground, sea, and with the recent addition of space.  To this time-honored list, military leaders should add cyber and cerebral domains and their relationships to the physical world.   The following thoughts provide some rationale for this proposition. 

Cyber domain.  The cyber domain is important because the world increasingly depends on it for the functional operations of its social, political, economic, financial, military, and ecological systems.   Further, it is in this domain that adversaries will struggle to gain information superiority and decision advantage.  In the future, during competition of any conceivable character, people making decisions faster and better than their opponents stand an excellent chance of winning.

The United States is growing increasingly dependent on the cyber world for its heath, well being, leisure, money-making, and economic activities, to name just a few important areas.  Because of our dependence on the cyber domain, opponents see it as “a place” and “a way” to attack us to affect decision-making, hence the will of the country.  Because of its importance in every day life and the magnitude of potential outcomes involving the cyber domains’ “life-blood” – information -- it follows that this important area of influence and activity becomes co-equal with the more traditional domains of conflict.

The issue is that this domain is somewhat abstract, complex, and alien to traditional military ways of thinking and planning.  That is, conflict in the cyber domain has no tangible or visible ground to hold.  Cyber-space is everywhere and nowhere.  Opponents in the cyber domain will as often as not be cyber bots doing their human masters’ bidding at machine speed.  Thus, it will become increasingly difficult for military people to “know” the enemy.  Collecting data, information, and knowledge will take place at light speed and will be invisible to the naked eye.  Traditions such as deception and espionage will be much more abstract and sophisticated than such operations in the kinetic, physical world that militaries are accustomed to.

Cerebral domain.  Knowledge Warfare involves making decisions faster and better than the opponent does.  Knowledge Warfare involves thinking.  With thought, knowledge workers add value to information and turn it into knowledge.  How humans think and view the world has a great deal of influence on accepting the multitude of inputs into their minds, processing information, seeking relationships through synthesis, and applying context, experience, and intuition to produce knowledge that has value.  Intellectual advantage enables the development of knowledge and is crucial for making decisions sufficiently superior to create the condition of information superiority.  Thus, antagonists in a struggle will try to improve their knowledge worker’s minds and protect those minds from intrusion or manipulation.  At the same time, opposing forces will attempt to manipulate the minds of opposing knowledge workers and decision-makers to affect the quality of knowledge and decisions being produced.

Thus, the cerebral domain arguably becomes the most important domain.  This value comes from the importance of the human mind in turning information into knowledge and developing knowledge more timely and relevant to the issue at hand than the opponents.  Additionally, Knowledge Warfare will involve traditional and non-traditional ways of conducting deception operations.  To deceive, one must have at least an approximate knowledge of how the opponent gathers information, places value on it, processes it (intellectually), thinks, collaborates, makes decisions, and gathers feedback on how the decisions are working out.  Confusing, slowing, or overloading the opponent’s mind through deception is one of the advantages people will learn to seek.

Individual and collective perceptions are crucial in the cerebral domain.  When thinking about perceptions, people have to think about analysis, duality, impact of culture, psyches (individual and aggregates), relationships with decision-making, relationships with information and knowledge, self-awareness (organizational and individual introspection), manipulation, and management.  Along with being fundamental for waging Knowledge Warfare, perceptions and thought relate strongly not only to decision-making, but to will.  Opposing sides will surely attempt to target the perceptions of opponent analysts (knowledge workers) who provide the knowledge that decision-makers need for making decisions.  If these efforts to alter or manipulate perceptions succeed, favorable outcomes could very well be skewed toward the side cleverest in continuously manipulating their adversary’s perceptions.

Environmental challenges to attaining Information Superiority.

To find and sustain the condition of information superiority, the Department of Defense faces formidable challenges.  If the Department of Defense does not address these challenges, the quest for achieving the condition of information superiority is doomed.  The challenges to attaining information superiority change in meaning and shape routinely and rapidly.  Thus, the 21^st century warrior will be an aggressive change agent – new challenges brought about by adversary advances and change will dictate such an approach.  In addition, the 21^st century warrior will be intellectually adaptive, technically astute, inquisitive, respectful of the capabilities of adversaries, and an ardent foe of the status quo.  The status quo in the rapidly changing environment characterizing future military operations is a significant resistor to progress.  People who constantly argue for the status quo will stagnate the process of change and delay coherent responsiveness to adversary act, react, and counteract cycles.  In this short section, I’ll present just a few of the challenges people face in national defense as they attempt to seek, find, and sustain information superiority.

·        Availability of technology.  Technology is readily available on the commercial market.  As an example, people can purchase .5-meter resolution imagery of any place they desire.   Currently, this imagery can be available in 24 hours.  In the future, the imagery will be available in just a few hours.  As other examples, people can buy GPS jammers, surveillance devices, and radio frequency jammers off the shelf.  In addition, people with the right money can buy the technology they need to collect, process, analyze/synthesize, and communicate – all the essential ingredients for potentially making decisions that are better and faster than their foes.  Moreover, people can find the technology they need for making individually delivered weapons of mass effect, such as chemical and biological weapons.  This availability of technology argues for a constantly searching and changing technological base for the defense of the country.  Moreover, it argues for a focus of the country’s intelligence system to judge relative advantages that the United States has or that the country’s adversaries have – this is a net assessment of technology.  As a last point, these challenges suggest that the country’s defenses can neither be complacent nor arrogant about any technological advantages it has – others will surely catch up and surpass the United States if it falls victim to these two conditions (complacency and arrogance).

·        Technological advancements.  Technology is advancing and changing at an amazing pace.  Closely guarded technological advances are becoming obsolete because of the intellectual energy of change and progress.  As an example, stealth technology may be in jeopardy because of the proliferation of  cellular phone towers and computer technologies.  In many ways, capitalism is driving the frenzy of technological change.  People love to innovate and create for profit.  The United States also educates many people in science and technology from foreign countries – some are not friendly to the goals and interests of the United States.  These people return to their countries and develop technologies that may or may not be used to promote goals inimical to those of the United States.   This phenomenon will not change because our openness is one of the strengths of the United States.  The country’s defenders though, must take the phenomenon of educating our current or future adversaries into account when they anticipate technological advancements.  As a final point, some adversaries have more money to spend on technological advancements than the United States military.  Drug gangs come to mind in this context.  Thus, the country has to surmise that others are as technologically advanced or soon will be thanks to education and money some of our adversaries have.

·        Effects based operations.  The Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) is experimenting with effects based operations.  Basically, effects based operations (EBO) involve analysis of a country’s system fabric and creating desired effects (outcomes) through actions that enable the effects to come into being.  At the heart of effects based operations lies the notion that many related elements of society make up the strength of a country.  These related elements in a metaphorical sense make up a tapestry of intertwined threads that comprise the whole or in the case of an actual tapestry, the picture.  When one thread becomes disturbed, the other threads move and change thanks to the intertwining relationships comprising the picture.  The interrelated parts of the tapestry from the perspective of a society include the social, political, economic, financial, military, and ecological systems, at a minimum.  When we follow the logic of such operations, actions create effects.  Effects influence decision-making.  Once decisions become influenced, a direct path to individual, organizational, or societal will becomes readily apparent.  The point is that EBO will be an excellent way to deal with adversarial nation-states of the future.  The problem is though, adversaries (including asymmetric threats) will probably choose to compete with the United States in the same way.

If adversaries are technologically astute, guided by highly educated and trained scientists and technologists, and have access to the latest technologies, they could cause much damage to the United States by coherently and systematically attacking the “threads” comprising the tapestry of the society’s social systems.  Our military planners must consider this possibility.  They will need help from the scientific and technological communities, as the race to the future and power will belong to the groups that can harness the best technology helping to make decisions better and faster than their adversaries will.  Effects-based operations provide a perfect venue for this to happen.

·        Paranoia, decentralization, and low-tech solutions.  Opponents of the United States will become increasingly paranoid.  When constantly worrying about the technological prowess of a country like the United States, its adversaries will assume that the United States security apparatus can see and hear them all the time and everywhere.  Such worry drives responses and actions.  Our adversaries of the future, for example will not transmit unencrypted cellular calls unless for the purpose of deception.  They will not allow their servers to be unguarded unless they want us to enter.   They will not show themselves without camouflaging or hiding their identities.  These opponents will not send e-mail without encrypting or hiding messages in digital water spots.  As another issue, the military activities of the country’s future adversaries will increasingly decentralize.  Such decentralization means that these adversaries will be more difficult to locate with any degree of precision, particularly in urban areas.  Moreover, if in a conflict, even if U.S. forces take out a decentralized element, it doesn’t necessarily affect the core element.

In addition, some foes will purposefully use low-tech solutions to compete with the United States.  Low-tech, in some cases is very difficult for a high-tech country to cope with.  As an example, think about the challenges the United States intelligence community had as it grappled with the messengers our foes used in Somalia.   The only good way to deal with low-tech adversaries is through human intelligence (HUMINT).  HUMINT though must improve technically and intellectually to provide the specificity, timeliness, accuracy, and relevancy that operations in the 21^st century will demand.

·        Counters, countermeasures, and counter-countermeasures.  For every action the U.S. military takes, there will be a reaction.  Because of the rapid pace of technological change and the way the United States depends on technology for its warfighting prowess, adversaries of the future will surely attempt to develop counters to our strengths – tangible and intangible.  Thus, to counter the counters, the United States will engage in countermeasures.  The adversary will respond and will develop counter-countermeasures.  The spiral goes on and on.  Thus the breadth, depth, and pace of technological change must advance unabated fueled by the definite knowledge that the adversary is attempting to negate the power of our technology all the while attempting to improve their own to attain a technological advantage.

·        Cyberspace.  Cyberspace will be particularly challenging for the United States military.  To be certain, the U.S. military is waking up to the need for developing protection for its networks (computer network defense) and for developing ways to conduct attacks (computer network attack).  With that said, cyberspace will continue to present challenges for the U.S. military from a variety of perspectives.  First, cyberspace is invisible – therefore, it’s difficult to envision, hear, or feel.  If you can’t envision, hear, or feel something, it’s difficult to think about in depth sufficient for learning to use or thwarting an opponent.  Second, cyberspace involves cyberbots moving, attacking, and defending at machine speed.  Human beings cannot hope to compete at this speed.  Humans need to combat these cyberbots with alerting sentinels, deceptive agents, and attacking agents and viruses.  The battlefield housing cyber-operations will be every bit as important as areas of operation on terrain of the past.  Third, United States armed forces will have to collect data, information, and knowledge in cyberspace from communications, networks, servers, databases, switches, routers, and the inner workings of servers and PCs.  This is a new arena, filled with challenges, for the intelligence community.  Fourth, cyberspace will be the battleground for much of the effects based operations I mentioned earlier.  Cyberspace is the conduit for manipulating images, affecting financial centers, affecting the minds of politicians and decision-makers, and conducting cyber-deception.  Quite simply, this challenge is so significant that if the country fails to meet it intellectually or technologically, our adversaries could seriously jeopardize the national well being.

·        Urban areas.  Foes of the future who desire to compete with the United States militarily will establish conditions for causing U.S. forces to engage in urban operations. Why? Urban terrain, along with cyber space, present the only places opponents can hope to establish conditions to accomplish their goals.  Urban areas are perfect places to unleash asymmetric strategies by a host of foes. Urban areas are conducive to asymmetric operations because our opponents can manipulate casualties, set up conditions that will enable extensive collateral damage, and play to the minds and emotions of Americans and coalition partners watching television or operating their computers. Moreover, competitors using asymmetric strategies can exploit the constraints.

In essence, the military needs flexibility to analyze and synthesize, collect, process, visualize and communicate to meet the needs of these environments  (open terrain, urban, cyber) or have separate yet related systems.  In addition, opponents won’t always operate as hierarchical organizations. Instead, they may be flat organizationally, spread throughout a city or under it, and only loosely connected. Moreover, owing to the potential of compromise of intent and personalities, their flat structures will change and relocate frequently, thereby making the information challenges for analysts and commanders all the more immense. For example, using the Internet, diverse organizations may come together to support one activity or protest and then disband (as the opponents of the World Trade Organization did in Seattle during the spring of 2000).  Future foes operating in urban terrain will perform their activities inside buildings, underground, on the Internet, or in other aspects of cyberspace. Intra-building and subterranean operations make sense owing to shortfalls of U.S. collection capabilities to collect, process, fuse and visualize data, information and knowledge in urban terrain.

Intelligence collection, a complicated business, has improved over time; by the end of the Cold War it worked very well.  Yet perplexing shortfalls remain and carry into the new operating environment that the United States transformation forces face.  For example, collected information doesn’t fuse well among military service collectors.  Thus, it’s difficult to create conditions enhancing synergy.  As another example, collectors in the Cold War era concentrated on military communications, moving targets, and attrition ranging from destroyed tanks to the damage inflicted by nuclear weapons.  Unfortunately, this issue constitutes only part of the problem that commanders of the future will face.   If the situation arises in which a conventional force engages the United States in force-on-force combat situations, the holdover collection system will work well.  But if the environment is similar to what has been described above, the collection system will prove inadequate.  That is, if our foes using asymmetric strategies engage our forces in urban terrain and cyber space, existing and planned collectors will have a difficult time providing information sufficient for the demands of the situation.

·        Cover, denial, and deception  Increasingly, future adversaries will go under cover and attempt to mask their activities and intentions from the “prying” eyes of the U.S. intelligence community in both physical and cyber worlds.  Unfortunately, intelligence collection doesn’t do well in discerning activities and intentions in covered locations, such as underground or even within buildings.  Nor has the intelligence community performed the “deep think” required to conduct operations in cyber space.  The implication is that the U.S. intelligence community needs collectors that can collect underground or within buildings using all senses and transmits gathered data and information without the adversary knowing that the collection has occurred.  It also needs collection and communications that operate in cyber space.  This is easier said than done, but it constitutes a growing concern in the country’s efforts to seek, find, and sustain information superiority.  In addition, adversaries will attempt to deceive our intelligence systems from their intentions, activities, and decisions.  They will use age-old methods of deceiving, such as designing physical signatures, patterns, and activities.  They will also use traditional electronic deception such as providing electronic signatures for collectors to detect.

Now though, deception will also occur in cyber space.  Such deception will attempt to fool intelligent agents (cyber bots) roaming cyberspace looking for data, information, and knowledge.  Deception in cyber space will also attempt to fool the programmers who write the code that directs the activities of the agents and the analysts or knowledge workers who direct the activities of these agents and receive their input.  The implications are threefold.  First, both sides will attempt both traditional and non-traditional deception.  Second, increasingly man and machine will have to work together to detect the activities of adversary cyber bots attempting to deceive or to “double” them for gaining advantage.  Third, ignoring traditional or non-traditional means of deception will occur at the peril of the participants in a contest.  For the time being, all aspects of deception will be relevant.

·        Swarming and miniaturization.  Both combat activities and intelligence collection will experience the rise in importance of swarming and miniaturization.  Increasingly, in combat, asymmetric adversaries will use swarms of cheap, expendable things to affect the capabilities of the United States to use a limited number of expensive, precision munitions.  Swarms can be composed of big things and small things.  Swarms self-adjust.  They adjust based on instructions from their controller.  Swarms communicate among themselves thereby providing the means to adjust depending on the situation and environment.  Swarms of cheap missiles will attempt to confuse and defeat smart, precision missiles, and swarms of cheap mines will seek to deny friendly sea based forces unrestricted access to denied areas.  Along with efforts to deny access, swarms like I am discussing will attempt to make cost ratios exorbitant for forces of the United States.  If a swarm of five hundred, $1K missiles can cause significant error in one $5 M missile, the cost ratio obviously favors the asymmetric adversary.  Swarms of missiles and mines will also attempt to deceive military planners about main effort and intent.  Miniaturization of implements of modern fields of strife will become increasingly important.  For example, swarms of micro, multi-sensor intelligence collectors will flood areas to gain insight into the opposing forces’ activities.  Organized forces will have limited capabilities to detect miniature swarms and if detection occurs, countermeasures will be difficult to discern, particularly in a quickly changing, technology-rich environment.

Interim summary

Information superiority is a condition enabling antagonists to possess advantages in decisions, intellects, knowledge, technology, position, and action.   People need, and therefore seek these advantages to win in competitive events or struggles.  People use technology to help them achieve advantage.  Technology is a tool that helps people search for, find, process, think about, synthesize relationships, decide, communicate those decisions, and receive and understand feedback about the effectiveness of decisions.  As such, people have to have access to information and knowledge that they can use to help them solve problems, make decisions superior to their opponent, or achieve advantages they desire in addition to the advantages they accrue when making superior decisions.  Thus, technology helps people collect data and turn it into information.  Knowledge workers provide value to information thereby turning it into knowledge.  Knowledge forms the underpinning for successful understanding that decision-makers need before they can make better and faster decisions than their opponents.

Conditions of information and superiority change rapidly thanks to the presence of an adaptive, learning, and adjusting opponent.  Both sides in a competitive endeavor will engage in a struggle to find the best information and knowledge, protect what they find, and use it to gain decision advantage when the timing is right.  Thus, a continuously shifting state exists in the struggle for information superiority and the various types of advantage that surface once information superiority is established.

An Operational Venn Diagram for Winning the Knowledge War

Now, we can delve into the things that must gel for the condition of information superiority to come into being.  Four elements of modern fields of strife are critical for enabling the concept of information superiority to come into being – communications, automation, collection, and analysis/synthesis. These elements will work best in a complementary role.  In fact, the desired condition is when these elements combine to allow the existence of a state of synergy between man and machine.

The following thoughts are not inclusive – they represent only a few of future capabilities that the Department of Defense needs to seek, find, and sustain information superiority.

·        Communications.  United States military forces will reduce their presence in foreign countries over the next 10-15 years.   Eventually, very few military forces will be stationed over seas.  But United States interests in foreign countries and regions will not subside.  Thus, to protect its interests, U.S. military forces must project military power rapidly when confronted with a conventional military situation.  To project its forces rapidly and use technology to the greatest possible extent to enhance knowledge and making fast, effective decisions, the U.S. military needs the very best communications possible.  The U.S. military standard has to be instant, sustained, and flexible global communications and assured access sufficient to provide support to highest to the lowest levels of military organizations.  Communications provide the lifeblood of good decisions – that is, communications provide data, information, and knowledge.  Communications also constitute the medium for turning knowledge into power.  Military analysts and leaders have to realize that smart, asymmetric adversaries of the future understand the importance of communications and will assault them kinetically and digitally trying for maximum disruption.  Ten important characteristics of communications follow.

Ĝ      Reachback.  Operations in foreign lands will require an assured reachback capability because of austere infrastructure conditions.  Reachback will go to various knowledge advantage centers in the United States.  Further reachback operations will take place inside the continental United States, as forward forces come to depend on foreign country and technology experts who support them from virtual locations.  These reachback operations require extensive communications allow supporting collaboration and visualization.  The object is, of course, to provide communications capabilities that can reach any soldier no matter where and ensure that the communications are secure.

Ĝ      Assured communications. To avoid dragging along a large infrastructure, military forces will come to rely on communications that connect to infrastructures residing in the United States.  Troops deploying very quickly to a foreign country will experience no larger problem than to be cut off from information radiating from the continental United States. Communications experts will have to build redundant means of communicating to ensure that soldiers on the ground still have communications even if a primary or alternate method of communicating goes down.  Lightweight, small, and powerful means for communicating, complete with adequate bandwidth, will constitute the key characteristics of communications supporting the future forces of the United States.

Ĝ      Support to all levels of command.  It is obvious that different levels of command require different levels of communications capabilities.   Heretofore, only large headquarters required and received communications support sufficient to justify the cost of large bandwidth requirements and assured communications.  With the changing environment and a near total dependence on information and knowledge, all levels of command need access to communications pathways and bandwidth to accomplish missions that will vary from day to day and location to location.  At the lowest level of operation, for example, Army and Marine squad leaders and individual soldiers will be involved in small unit military operations.  They need low probability of intercept (LPI) and low probability of detection (LPD) communications with sophistication sufficient for accomplishing tasks with minimum collateral damage and loss of life.  This requirement is no small feat.  Literally hundreds of squads could very well be conducting operations throughout a city, each requiring communications and sufficient but differing bandwidth to support their missions.  In this case, communications receiver/transmitters (R/T) need to be very small, lightweight, powerful, and capable.  The R/T will in reality be a small computer or PDA that presents a clear, color GUI, and will be capable of receiving and sending imagery and receiving 3-D visualization of key targets, insides of buildings, and the like, in a secure environment.  

Ĝ      Security.  Channels of communications have to be secure.  Secure information enables commanders to have confidence in the veracity of information and knowledge to make fast, effective decisions.  Security must be of such high quality that commanders have absolute confidence in the data, information, or knowledge thereby finding and sustaining an environment in which they can make fast, effective decisions.  The adversary, of course, wants to distort or fuzz the data, information, and knowledge in question to the point that decisions become slower while theirs becomes better and faster.

Ĝ      Swarming.  The use of swarming technology could be “a way” to provide communications.  Swarming devices communicate among themselves and with other entities.  Miniature swarms use MEMS technology and could be an answer to provide communications and necessary bandwidth on demand to the multitude of consumers the communications organizations will have to service.  Swarms could move as a loosely connected entity, such as a cloud of dust, or as insects.  Moreover, swarms of communications entities could move to a location and perch on high ground, trees, buildings, or even underground with small groups acting as communications relays for more stationary larger groups.  If communications faltered, communication swarms would be programmed to automatically seek to reestablish communications.

Ĝ      Resistance to jamming.  Communications devices must be resistant to jamming.  Asymmetric foes will purchase cheap, off-the-shelf jammers to disrupt friendly communications.   GPS, for example, is critically important to fighters on the ground for figuring out their locations.  GPS is also important for guidance of precision-guided munitions.   Asymmetric foes will surely attempt to fuzz the accuracy thereby negating a great advantage that forces of the United States currently hold – precision strikes.  Asymmetric opponents will attempt to jam uplinks and downlinks to satellites.  Eventually, digital communications will incur jamming from cyber bots operating in cyber space.  These bots will attempt to influence the programming within packets or opposing cyber bots by sending electrical signals that will affect location and mission programming.  A growing emphasis on disrupting the communications induced coherency in cyber space will develop involving jamming among digital entities.  Thus, counters to those jamming efforts will be a premium service and commodity.

Ĝ      Wireless.  Wireless communications will continue to be important.  Wireless communications must be miniaturized and made even more lightweight than now.   Wireless communications must answer difficult integration needs such as integrating imagery, video, and streaming video operating without the implements of a massive infrastructure, such as cellular phone towers.   Wireless communications must have displays that show imagery, video, streaming video, and 3-D visualization.  Wireless communications must improve to provide direct input of communications into the brain and eye.  Wireless communications must provide data, information, and knowledge to small computers embedded within the skin or in the brain of a combatant.

Ĝ      Layers of communication (satellites – high and low-earth orbiters).  Single sources of communications will not be appropriate.  Quite simply, too many variables can surface affecting the throughput of communications.   When people are projected to far away objective areas and they depend on communications to provide the data, information, and knowledge they need for making effective decisions, they cannot rely on single sources only to have them fail on occasion.  Layers of communications might be a way to go at this problem.  Its theory rests on a communications system of system, in which layers of communications devices would be layered vertically and horizontally, all connecting with each other.  Satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned aerial combat vehicles, balloons, and traditional aerial communications aircraft would work as a system to provide users, regardless of rank or location, the types of information and knowledge they need at the times and locations they desire.  Thus, interface software would have to be interoperable.  Moreover, it would be helpful if data processing could occur on the communications aerial vehicle.  The connectivity would be wireless and would connect with gateways leading to the Internet.

Ĝ      Fiber enhancements.  Fiber optic cable continues to spread around the world regardless of the economic slow down.  Fiber is the dominant way in which people communicate in the digital world.  With an ever-increasing demand for bandwidth, ways to enhance the capacity of fiber to carry digital communications will become increasingly important.  Or, developing ways to conserve bandwidth but still have the capability to send and receive essential communications will be important.  Compression and change detection come to mind as ways people currently conserve bandwidth.  It seems to reason that developments such as hollow fiber and follow on technology to derivatives of OC 768 technology, such as dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) and synchronous optical network (SONet), are only the start to expand in technological capabilities.  OC 768 technology can send video, voice communications, and data at speeds up to 40 Gbps.  This figure will only increase with the passage of time and research and development.  The U.S. military will need fiber to engage in information superiority struggles, as the constant hunger for ever-increasing bandwidth grows.  The country’s adversaries will use increasing amounts of commercial bandwidth available on the open markets.  Each antagonist’s quests for more bandwidth and better communications will continue to grow.  Thus, it will behoove scientists to continue to find ways to improve the capacity of fiber.

Ĝ      Internet2.  Internet2 is the next generation of the current Internet.  Currently, the Internet has limitations because it was never intended to provide services to millions of people around the world.  Internet2 is being designed with functions of sharing and moving information and knowledge.   The Futurist magazine says “The key to Internet2 is vastly increased broadband capacity, permitting information to move 600 times faster than is possible using phone lines.”[3]  Armed forces and asymmetric forces around the world will take advantage of the dramatically improved Internet to further their aim of achieving information superiority.  Cyber strategists must anticipate this enhanced way of communicating and how it empowers individuals, organizations, and countries.  

·        Automation.

Ĝ      Virtual reality wargaming.  Virtual reality wargaming will grow in importance for several reasons.  First, wargamers need “a way” to defeat the curse of mirror imaging that places their value sets, way of thinking, and culture onto an opponent when the opponent will likely view the world differently thanks to coming from a different culture, and possessing different values, and different ways of thinking.  Second, variables will be crucial.  Act, react, and counter act cycles of wargaming enable one side to consider how the adversary could react to an action and how the friendly side could counteract to the reaction.  In addition, some variables will be more sensitive than others.  Wargamers need to find the most sensitive variables and develop a plan to manipulate the opponent’s while protecting one’s own.  Third, wargamers need to develop a list of possibilities.  Possibilities are potentialities unbound by constraints.  Of course, the top priority possibilities have to be worked on first rather than the most unlikely possibilities.  Fourth, the wargamer needs to use simulation to plan a collection plan to seek, find, and obtain valuable data, information, and knowledge.  Moreover, the wargamer needs to understand how the opponent could very well be involved in collection operations and in using collection assets to provide feedback on the worthiness of decisions and adjustments therein.  Such modeling in a simulated environment enables the wargamer to plan deception operations.  Fifth, such a modeling and simulation environment would enable human beings to plan, execute, and monitor operations in the invisible, digital world.  In this world, cyber bots are the soldiers who move at the speed of light along the pathways of fiber optic cable, which are the lines of communication in cyber space, and hard disk drives, servers, and databases that constitute key terrain.

Ĝ      Collaboration.  Clearly collaboration will be increasingly important in the future.  Collaboration enables people to aggregate their intellects to solve problems.  Quite literally hundreds of minds can come together virtually to solve problems and provide input to complex decision-making regardless of the leader’s location.  Collaboration must be simple to use and complexity must be transparent to the user.  Collaboration should involve only a few clicks with a mouse to call up web pages.  Users should be able to modify various aspects of the collaborative environment to meet their particular needs.  Collaboration should involve multi-media and should grow to include all the senses.  People need to have sufficient resolution to view their co-collaborators’ body language and sincerity.

§          Telepresence software operating over Internet2 will allow merging of videoconferencing and virtual reality immersing the knowledge worker in multiple locations with multiple connections.[4] Telepresence, operating over the bandwidth of Internet2, will allow the integration of simple (data from collectors) to complex (open source information, with media video clips, with audio, with text, with multi-level classified information and knowledge, with cyber bots and physical entities on the ground, in the air, or on the sea).  Telepresence software will support interactive, virtual reality wargaming with players around the world.

Thanks to telepresence and Internet2, the knowledge workers application of value to information will occur much more rapidly thus theoretically enabling decision-makers to make better and faster decisions than the adversary.  Commanders and other leaders, for example, will be able to get high pixel density approximations of reality on larger screens.  Imagine being able to stick you arm into the screen so that it is represented on many other screens thousands of miles away and being able to show people the database or switch that cyber bots will be probing, as they look for valuable data, information, and knowledge.  This is the notion of a digital sand table, one that can be transported over Internet2 and displayed around the world at near light speed.  The software possibilities for Internet2 are staggering.  Adversaries with advanced thinking about these possibilities will have an edge in the race for valuable knowledge for decision-making in the future.

§          Instant Messaging.   People want information and knowledge.   As a qualifier, people want relevant information at the location they want, at the time they want, and in the format they want.  People want information with which to make decisions and for building knowledge.  In the future, people will receive information while in the air or from any physical location around the globe.  In this respect, people will respond to a sender immediately and enter into collaborative environments with others using secure instant messaging that is voice activated and driven.  In addition, people will receive and send instant messages using graphics, imagery, music, and text.  Soon olfactory and physical messages will affect the receiver’s state of equilibrium too.  These messages will come across the person’s PDA or cellular phone, fully capable of being annotated and returned in the near-term future.  In the far-term, these messages will feed directly into the mind.  Moreover, instant messages will fed into microcomputers embedded in people’s bodies.  Mobile instant messaging will come about primarily through voice directives.  Intelligent agents will package messages in the format and time span that the sender desires.

§         Peer to peer collaboration.  Clearly people have chosen to engage with others in a direct way.  Much of this exchange of information and knowledge lie in the realm of collaboration, particularly in peer to peer (P2P).  P2P collaboration is merely an example of a trend that has been obvious for quite some time.   This trend will continue to grow in size and importance.  Much of this activity can and will take place using increasingly dynamic web sites.  Then, when Internet2 becomes more adaptive, military people and organizations will communicate without having to call up web sites or wade through web pages.  This form of collaboration will see dramatic improvements and enhancements with the advent of tactile interactions when far apart physically.  Additionally, the ability to connect with experts in a collaborative environment to seek and use opinions will improve.  True intellectual power lies in the synthesis of several different expert opinions.  Increasingly, intelligent agents will assist people in finding the right experts to collaborate with and the right times to bring people together in a collaborative, virtual environment.

Ĝ      Relationship identity.  Relationships will be critically important for gaining decision, intellectual, knowledge, positional, and action advantages.  Relationships add value to information and knowledge that have a value in their own right.  Typically, people perform analytic functions very well.  With analysis, they tear ideas and concepts apart to fine levels of detail and granularity.  Analysts come to know these details very well.  Unfortunately, people don’t habitually put the bits and pieces of information back into a whole nor do they search for relationships with other wholes.  Obvious relationships are easy to spot.  But, disparate relationships are difficult to surmise particularly if the relationships exist across categories.  Thus, a role for software in the future, particularly autonomous intelligent agents, will be to search for, find, and present the obvious and disparate relationships that knowledge workers and decision-makers need for creating synergistic and combinatorial effects (outcomes) they seek.

Ĝ      Digital maneuver.  Maneuver will occur in cyber space.  It will yield advantages in tempo, momentum, and initiative.  Individual and groupings of cyber bots operating in cyberspace will execute digital maneuver.   Swarms of cyber bots will operate together to accomplish defensive or offensive missions.  These cyber bot swarms will move at the speed of light and will communicate among themselves and with their handlers.  Leaders will be able to mass swarms of cyber bots to gain advantage over their adversaries.   Maneuver will occur at the speed of light so decisions have to come from cyberbots.  Undoubtedly not all cyberbots operating in swarms will be capable of making decisions.   Instead, these operative swarms will have leaders and executors.  The leaders will be better protected because they have more capabilities and sophisticated resident source code.  Maneuver also will occur among Intranets operating virtual private networks (VPN).  Leaders making decisions will be able to “mass” intellects over the VPNs in their system of systems using collaborative tools and wide-bank networks (Internet2).  They will be able to shift emphasis at a moment’s notice and “maneuver” digits, data, information, and knowledge to accomplish their goals and objectives and make decisions faster than their adversaries will.  Of course, their adaptive foes will be doing the same thing.  Thus, we can conclude that the output from these machinations is the maneuver of knowledge.

Ĝ      Chips embedded in human beings.  Chips will become so small and unobtrusive that they will become a part of human anatomy.  Chips will operate at very fast speeds and enhance senses, enhance strength, and greatly improve thinking power.  Embedded chips will be particularly important for reconnaissance and surveillance operations and HUMINT intelligence collection.  Along with processing information and knowledge and storing it for future use, these embedded chips will communicate with other embedded and external chips passing data, information, and knowledge in a wireless network of man and machine interactivity.  Chips will enable the human to interact with the machine to solve problems.  This will be a complementary relationship in that humans will perform the skills they are better suited for than computers and computers will perform tasks that they are better suited for than the human.  Clusters of miniature chips will operate throughout the human body.  One cluster will be more capable than the others and will serve as the “control node,” while the other, less capable chips will enhance senses, mental functioning, and physical capabilities.

Ĝ      Knowledge management. How people and organizations manage data, information, and knowledge will be important in making decisions faster and better than the adversary.

§         Definition of knowledge management.  “A way” to define knowledge management is:

Purposeful and systematic retrieving, processing, organizing, analyzing, synthesizing, and sharing data, information, and knowledge among knowledge workers, decision-makers, and organizations.

§         Definition of knowledge worker.  “A way” to define knowledge worker is:

A person or group of people working in the information society providing value to products by adding information, knowledge, understanding, experience, and skills from the person’s mind or from external sources.

§         The concept of knowledge management.  A few ideas will facilitate greater understanding of this complex but essential subject -- knowledge management.  First, knowledge management relies on human beings, their intellectual capabilities, and their expertise.  Information technology is an enabler for the process in which humans provide value to products, but it clearly has a secondary role in knowledge management.  Second, knowledge management involves synergy – that is, pooling people’s minds and coming up with solutions, innovation, or problem resolution that dwarfs what a single person could do.  Third, knowledge management involves several types of knowledge.   Tacit knowledge is what people know in their minds.  It’s their intuition, beliefs, and gut feelings.  Explicit knowledge is written down.  It’s in databases, standing operating procedures, policies, and the like.  Embedded knowledge is what people do automatically in their work processes – it’s embedded in the business processes of organizations.

§         Data Marts/Data Mining.  Data Marts will continue to be important, as they constitute a way to obtain, transform, and organize data.   Data Marts differ from the larger data warehouses.  Data warehouses have as their constituent parts the integration of diverse and often redundant information assets.  Typically, data warehouses are quite large, expensive, and difficult to work with.  An organization has only one enterprise data warehouse but can have many smaller data marts.  All data in a data warehouse is converted to a common format and software environment.  Data marts, on the other hand, are smaller, more agile, and easier to access and manipulate.  In addition, data marts often focus on one business process and often have necessary applications, such as SAP and visualization, built into the data structure.  Data marts involve decision systems incorporating a subset of a business’ data focused on specific functions or activities of the concerned organization.  As a final point, data in data marts can be, and often is, in different formats.  Thus, interfaces among data marts and data warehouses are important, as they need to be accessible and robust.

§         Knowledge Mapping.  Knowledge mapping will be increasingly important in the future for personal, business, and governmental use.   Knowledge mapping enables people to find the knowledge they need for adding value to products, improving one’s knowledge and understanding, and for making rapid decisions.  The complication is, of course, that the knowledge mapping is only as good as the input, logic trail, access rules and procedures.  Knowledge mapping helps knowledge workers in organizations share and use information and knowledge efficiently and effectively.  Knowledge mapping will use intelligent agents particularly when seeking relationships among data, information, and knowledge.  Knowledge mapping will also use extensive visualization so that in a glance, knowledge workers will know where to find critical information and knowledge they need for specific requirements.  Knowledge mapping also includes identifying critical knowledge and the skills of knowledge workers in the particular organization or located elsewhere.  With the Internet, it is increasingly important for knowledge maps not only to depict the knowledge and expertise resident in the physical organization but in virtual locations scattered about the world.  With knowledge mapping, organizations will visualize instantly and completely critical knowledge assets, the relationships between these, and the skills, competencies and technologies required to meet future market demands.

§         Knowledge Preservation/Transfer.  With the increasingly nomadic shifts of IT workers, organizations of all types are having an increasing problem retaining knowledge – tacit knowledge of their knowledge workers.  Knowledge workers carry much value in their minds – their thoughts, experience, training and education, expertise, and visions.  The issue is that these skills are largely invisible, difficult to quantify, and almost impossible to put into databases.  Databases after all have fields and fields have rules of entry.  Unfortunately, tacit knowledge often doesn’t follow strict rules and procedures for entry into databases.  Regardless, how an organization captures the tacit knowledge of its employees is crucial for viability.  Otherwise, new people constantly have to “reinvent the wheel” when they arrive.  What can be done?  For one thing, people need a repository for their ideas, thoughts, and insights.  Such a repository needs to be set up purposefully.  Software needs to organize the material into categories and bins of knowledge so others can use it.  As another way, knowledge transfer should relate closely to knowledge mapping.  People in the organization should know how to seek and find the knowledge they need.  As a final proposition, people need a good knowledge base to start with.  Knowledge workers should develop their own knowledge base and continuity files.  This can be a daunting task, particularly with new or busy people.  Software can help overcome this challenge.  That is, it seems obvious that a good, usable, and powerful wizard could go far in helping knowledge workers set up their own knowledge base for importation to the repository of knowledge I mentioned earlier.

Ĝ      Search engines.  The world needs faster, more thorough and smarter search engines.  In fact, eventually, intelligent agents will operate search engines.  These software programs will learn from interacting with humans and inside the digital world.  Eventually, intelligent agents will be capable of searching for and finding information people need, form relationships, explain nuances, and find "epiphany” relationships among disparate elements of data, information, and knowledge.  In addition, future search engines will present information conducive to the way people think.  As an example, some people find 3-D and 4-D visualization conducive to their thought processes.

Ĝ      Fusion/Transformation/Integration.  Some of our most significant challenges of the future lie in fusing data, information, and knowledge.   This process involves merging or bringing together differing elements and data sets and presenting them in a unified picture or whole.  Fusion is a mechanical process.  The human function resembling the mechanical function of fusion is the thinking skill of synthesis.   Information, knowledge, and understanding in various forms of meaning have to undergo integration to provide maximum value to knowledge workers – integrating software, integrating hardware, integrating telephony with computers, and integrating sound (MP3) with imagery all conducted over the Internet.   To integrate software, hardware, and peripherals, people need standards or, as an alternative, software that allows integration regardless of standardization.

Ĝ      Database Management.  Databases will be continually updated by continuous feeds of relevant information and knowledge.   Snap shots in time will be passé.  With this automation of feeds into databases for continuous updating comes the responsibility to ensure data, information, and knowledge is valid.   Intelligent agents will help tailor the database management system with guidance provided by users.  Databases will have common interfaces, enabling many databases to work together seamlessly.  Increasingly, intelligent agents will help people load database fields.  Heretofore, databases are often error ridden because of human mistakes.  As intelligent agents become smarter, they will take over much of the work of designing fields and inputting various types of data, information, and knowledge into the fields and alerting knowledge workers when there are problems or when critical updates have occurred.  Critical database fields will be a part of the instant messaging systems that will populate military organizations.  Sorting and cataloging data, information, and knowledge will be done with voice command or as simple as drawing a line between two circles.  The important aspect of effectiveness will often be speed particularly in sorting by time, distance, location, relevance, and relationship.  Through database management, people will be become adept at combining pieces, things, or ideas into a powerful collage quickly and efficiently.

Ĝ      Intelligent agents.  Intelligent agentry will become increasingly important with the passage of time.  Computer software in the form of intelligent agents must help human beings in several ways.  First, agents must help people understand complexity.  Second, agents help people cope with the speed of action in cyber space.  People can neither think nor act at the speed of light – intelligent agents can.  Third, intelligent agents help people overcome shortfalls in synthesizing information and knowledge.  Since much of the data, information, and knowledge people need for making fast, effective decisions flows through the “veins” of cyber space, it follows that intelligent agents are crucial in the struggle in supremacy in decision-making, thus Knowledge Warfare.  Thus, how scientists develop the concept and actually program intelligent agents will be crucial for engendering activities most conducive to success in cyber space.

§         Characteristics.  Intelligent agents learn quickly.   They present data, information, and knowledge in a format most readily acceptable to the way their human master thinks and acts.   Eventually, in some aspects of comparison, intelligent agents become smarter than their human handlers.  Intelligent agents form relationships from obvious and disparate things, objects, data, information, and knowledge.  Intelligent agents act quickly -- at the speed of light in the cyber domain.  They adapt thoroughly to requirements and preferences of their masters and provide the data, information, and knowledge needed for decision-making.  Intelligent Agents anticipate the future.  They anticipate their master’s future needs and those of the adversary based on past experience and sensing of the environment, missions, and activities of rival cyber bots, and constraints – all of which are programmed into the “brain” of the agent.  Lastly, intelligent agents make rapid decisions and act.  As I mentioned earlier, in cyber space, there isn’t time for consultation between the intelligent agent and their human handlers.  Thus, intelligent agents have to be programmed to decide and act at the speed of light.

§         Roles and missions. Intelligent agents will perform many roles and missions in future military operations.

¨      Offensive.  These agents roam cyber space seeking data, information, and knowledge from adversaries.  The agents enter databases and find the decision-making logic resident in the code of software that adversaries use for making decisions.  The agents collect data, information, and knowledge from the modems, switches, routers, and hubs, which channel digital flows – this is the cyber landscape.  Agents will sometimes be stationary, observing or surveiling locations or points on the terrain of cyber space.  Agents will reconnoiter digital conduits or highways for activities such as the movement of particular digital packets.  Agents will latch onto and ride packets and enter their structure to ascertain the data, information, and knowledge contained therein.  Intelligent agents will serve to help deceive opponent agents by routing them into honeypots and by acting as packets for opposing agents to “ride” and steal the valuable data, information, and knowledge.  Intelligent agents will be sleeper agents lurking in databases or along communications conduits waiting for a “wake up call” from their handlers to execute cyber speed operations.  Intelligent agents will conduct attacks against opposing force information technology systems that support decision-making.  These attacks will include invisible strokes – injection of viruses, and visible strokes – eating the silicon on processor chips.

¨      Defensive roles.  Intelligent agents will act as sentinels that protect entrée into the information technology that supports decision-making.  They will serve to parry attempts by adversary intelligent agents (cyber bots) to enter friendly decision-making systems.  Intelligent agents will shunt adversary agents into honeypots, thereby confusing them about the reality of the location or assisting in the conduct of cyber deception.  Intelligent agents will assist defenders by identifying the characteristics of the attacking agent and by locating the origin of the attack.  Intelligent agents will assist the defender by surmising if the attack was local or related to other attacks.  Intelligent agents will assist in defense by quickly learning the code of the attacking agent and ascertaining strengths and vulnerabilities for possible counterattack or manipulation.

¨      Wargaming roles.  Intelligent agents will act as opponents in virtual reality wargaming.  For the sake of discussion, these agents can be called avatars.  Avatars will assume the role of both kinetic and cyber opponents.   These agents will be programmed by software engineers from the country in question to help overcome the human proclivity to mirror image one's cultural background, value set, and thinking onto the opponent.  Before the avatar becomes truly intelligent, humans will drive the majority of act, react, and counteract decisions.  Once the avatar learns over time, it will assume greater decision-making responsibilities.  Through this interaction -- avatar and humans -- sensitive variables surface.  These variables are candidates for manipulation either through kinetic or digital action to affect the adversary’s decisions and protecting one’s own.   In addition, this wargaming with avatars will identify a range of intelligence collection and other resources for judging the worth of decisions that adversaries have to make.  The friendly opponent can use intelligent agents to provide groupings and clustering of collection assets to collect against the feedback mechanisms that the adversary agent could put into place to provide feedback on specific decisions.

¨      Benign roles.  Intelligent agents will rapidly search for and sort data, information, and knowledge thereby facilitating the potential for people to engage in rapid decision-making.  Intelligent agents will be involved in visualizing information and knowledge for humans to gain better understanding of the complexity of the world, of cyber space, and the adversary’s minds.  The agent will package data, information, and knowledge to complement the way the individual thinks.  Intelligent agents will also seek, find, and explain obvious and disparate relationships conducive to synthesis.

Ĝ      Hardware characteristics.  Because of the absolute need for U.S. Armed Forces to move quickly and to leave large, unwieldy infrastructures in the continental United States, technology must become more dependable, smaller, and lighter, all the while becoming more capable.  Computing hardware will have large storage capacity accessed by extremely fast, intelligent software.  Increasingly powerful processors directs and guides software allowing millions of bits of data to process quickly, fusion of data to occur regardless of source, and integration of multiple sources of data, information, and knowledge to occur almost instantly.  Leaders making decisions will need this type of support because their adversaries will be able to purchase the fastest and most capable processors available on the commercial market.  Hardware will become so small and user friendly that it will merge with human beings’ system of system within the human body – with this occurrence comes the true advent of man/machine symbiosis, from a hardware sense.  What are left to be determined is when this technological advancement will occur and whether the implants will work with biological or signal processing.  The implants will probably come into being within the next twenty years and become operational within twenty-five years.  The country needs to invest in its scientists to research the area of processing between hardware (embedded chips) and man to develop technology appropriate for what it is meant to accomplish or contribute.  Human input to these implanted chips will hopefully be by voice, touch, and electromagnetic sensing from changes in activity, fear, and variations in weather and humidity.   Computer chips will become so smart that they can anticipate what the human purveyor of the chip needs and when support is needed.

Ĝ      Visualization.  People will depend more on visualization to help understand complexity quickly.  This understanding will be enhanced by hardware implants in the human’s body.  Thus streaming media and sounds will come into the implanted chip, which will communicate with chips enhancing the brain and eyes.  These chips will form the relationships, follow-on needs, and display the visualization of complexity via a retinal enhancer or directly into the mind of the recipient of the visualization.  Visualization will be in the traditional four dimensions (time, depth, height, width) and two non-traditional dimensions (cyber space and cerebral).   It will allow entrée into virtual reality wargaming regardless of location.  Visualization will fuse data and information and display them in multimedia format.  Visualization will allow the integration of data, information, and knowledge from all sources and will allow for integration of allied and coalition partners.   Visualization will allow Special Operations soldiers virtual entrée into target areas to include into the nooks and crannies of cyber space.

·        Collection.

Ĝ      Collection against traditional, force-on-force opponents.  Intelligence collection does well against conventional targets.  Collection will continue to involve the traditional collection functions of determining the location of fixed and moving targets in all types of terrain.  Collection devices must have enhanced capabilities to ensure specific, accurate, relevant, and timely information while protecting the force.  Conventional collection will aim at command and control for determining intent and decision-making activities of adversaries.  It will also aim at adversary intelligence collection, which will be the means that the opposing leaders will measure the effectiveness of their effects and their decision-making.  Collection will have to find moving SAMS and SSM targets (both asymmetric counters to U.S. military strengths) within constraints imposed in timeliness and accuracy owing to the need to make fast decisions and minimizing collateral damage and casualties for both sides in military operations.

Ĝ      Collection against Anti-Access Systems.  Collection will have to obtain information about weapons and information systems that provide anti-access capabilities to asymmetric foes.  Included will be the location and activities of swarms of devices designed for the purposes of intelligence collection, deception, or physical destruction of friendly missiles, ships, and planes.  Key to the effort to counter an asymmetric foe’s anti-access capabilities will be the system of system approach.  That is, in an anti-access system of systems, collectors will search for the anti-access system command and control, and communications, including the fiber optic cable that connects the anti-access systems among themselves and in the military hierarchy.  Collectors will also search for the anti-access system’s intelligence collection systems, the FM and HF means of communications, and the launching mechanisms.   Not to be forgotten in this broad intelligence collection requirement, any viable collection system will have to find anti-access missile and swarm bed down sites and storage facilities, the computer hardware and software that operate and fire the systems, and the people (knowledge workers) who operate and maintain the systems.  Again, collection devices will have to answer specificity, timeliness, accuracy, and relevancy criteria for success.

Ĝ      Collection against hardened targets.  This type of collection presents great challenges.  More and more of the country’s future adversaries are moving underground because they believe that the United States intelligence system cannot see or hear underground.  Thus, command posts will be deeply buried and will be centers for adversary decision-making.  It will be very difficult to know if the command post is active or inactive.  Thus, in a general sense, intelligence collection must be able to enter these locations, surveil and reconnoiter without being discovered, and transmit collected data and information to external friendly fusion centers for quick use in friendly decision-making.  Intelligence collectors must determine if the command post is “hot” or merely in the caretaker mode.  Intelligence collection must be capable and sensitive enough to take still photos, video, and hear conversations.  Intelligence collection against hard targets must be able to collect against computer, communications, and collection systems housed within the underground command post. Collectors will be operated through micro electronic mechanical systems (MEMS).  Sensors must see, hear, and smell.  Sensors must perform on-board processing and possess long-lasting, extremely light power capabilities.  Sensors must not be vulnerable to detection.  Sensors must collect against physical objects, human activities, and against cyber bots and database logic in cyberspace.  Sensors must use paths of communications that take advantage of existing adversary communications, e.g., fiber optics, if the sensor cannot transmit because of some physical obstruction.

Ĝ      Collection to support Special Operations.  Given the types of people special operations will have as adversaries, it is a safe bet that they will be adaptive, learning, and constantly changing.  They will become smarter and more technically capable with time.  Similar to any dismounted or mounted force, Special Operations people need sensors to detect booby traps.  They also need sensors that detect various types of non-lethal weapons such as superlubricants, sticky foam, and the like.  Special Operations personnel need to know with much precision the location of countersurveillance devices, such as infrared, thermal, and light intensifying imaging equipment.  For reconnaissance missions, Special Operations personnel need sensors that enhance sight and hearing from great distances.  Special Operations people need collection devices that micro-archive to explore miniscule objects (because of distance) in detail.  These types of operations need tracking and locating devices that are miniature and operate with minimum power for the sake of preserving batteries and to help avoid detection.  These types of operations need sensors that detect the location and composition of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.  Special Operations forces need devices that detect variation or interference in digital transmissions, visualization, or hearing devices.  Special Operations forces need sensors to discover the presence of cellular phone-initiated remote detonations.  Special Operations forces need sensors that capture their thoughts and sensings and transmit them to knowledge advantage centers.  Special Operations forces need sensors that find people and things in difficult terrain, e.g., urban areas, mountains, and triple canopy jungle.

Ĝ      Collection in urban terrain.  What collection capabilities do people operating in an urban environment need? First, U.S. forces need to improve the capability to operate against wireless, cellular phones, computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Second, U.S. forces need very fast access to HUMINT-derived information. HUMINT collectors need a way to digitize their thoughts, observations and reflections, and to transmit to a fusion system where the data fuses with all sources of information collection into dynamic, changing, situational awareness visualization. Technology must provide information assurance to the point that veracity is a given, so commanders can believe in HUMINT rather than rejecting, delaying or confirming with other sources prior to accepting the information. Third, collection must get into the rooms where asymmetric foes plot their operations and whisper instructions.  Intent is critical; therefore, collection devices must gather information being spoken and transmit it to analysis/synthesis centers.  Language translation technology will be critically important for speed and accuracy. Fourth, collectors must be stealthy, miniature and robotic. They must be capable of collecting, processing and transmitting information to satellites or satellite surrogates for gathering into fusion technology and immediate dissemination to people operating on the ground. Fifth, collection must sense the moods of crowds so commanders can anticipate potential crowd-related troubles. Sixth, collection must answer questions about metrics associated with effects of information operations.

Ĝ      Collection in cyber-space.  Collection in cyber space will be particularly challenging.  Collection efforts will be similar to collection in conventional settings from only one perspective.  Both aspects of collection seek valuable data, information, and knowledge.  Cyber space is invisible, but it needs to be modeled to help in intelligence collection.  People need to visualize in virtual reality what they cannot see or feel.  Antagonists will wargame collection efforts in cyberspace using virtual reality and cyber bots.  The cyber bots in the virtual reality wargame will learn from the experiences of the wargame, from the analyst controlling the wargame, and will then actually enter cyberspace to obtain specific, timely, relevant, and accurate data, information, and when possible, knowledge.  Principal collection devices will be cyber bots – autonomous, intelligent agents programmed to collect data from hard disk drives, RAM, ROM, communications pathways, switches, databases, and routers.  Cyber bots will also collect data and information from digital telephone systems, digital television sets, and cellular phones.  Cyber bots will enter databases and access and copy selected data, information, and knowledge and forward the collected material to the sender of the cyber bot.  Cyber bots will also track the activities of encrypted digital packets.  In addition, cyber bots will track the activities and presence of opposing force cyber bots.  The activities of cyber bot intelligence collectors will be active and dormant.  That is, some cyber bots will roam through cyber space; others will concentrate on reconnoitering communications pathways, or conducting surveillance on switches or routers.  Some cyber bots will determine the adversary’s digital defensive perimeter and relay to the programmer/analyst types of firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and encryption for computers, communications, and telephony.  Other cyber bots will attempt to locate the adversary’s information centers of gravity where collection, communications, automation, thinking and planning, and decisions occur.  Cyber bots will also have the mission of searching for and alerting people to adversary attempts to engage in cyber deception.  Some cyber bot collectors will be “sleepers” that exist everywhere and nowhere.  They will come to life and perform their tasks with a small amount of electrical pulse from their human handler or from other cyber bots.

·        Analysis and synthesis. 

Ĝ      Human beings will need to improve their thinking capabilities to cope with the increasing complexities of the world.  Improvements can occur through schooling, mentoring, and individual learning.  Primarily, people need to learn to synthesize bits and pieces of information into greater, more powerful, and more meaningful wholes.  They must learn to search for and find obvious and disparate relationships.  As previously discussed, intelligent agents and fast processors can help in such endeavors.  It is equally clear that human beings need cerebral enhancements to enter and win Knowledge Warfare.   That is, the man/machine symbiosis will have to occur with man and machine operating as one, each capturing the strengths and minimizing the weaknesses of the other.  Such symbiosis can occur through the growing intelligence of intelligent agents and other learning software.  It can also occur with miniature computers embedded in the bodies of people.  Symbiosis can also occur with computer chip brain implants designed to help people think well or to enhance their intellectual capabilities in language, math, computer science, and so forth.

Ĝ      Automation can also help people think by collecting, collating, and visualizing data, information, and knowledge needed to measure effectiveness (MOE) and measure performance (MOP).  Since many of the elements of importance in Knowledge Warfare are nuance laden and intangible (invisible to the human eye) computer software can be programmed to search for, relate, and interpret meaning for the human being.  Monitoring measures of effectiveness while conducting information operations will be critical.   Traditional intelligence collection will not work.  But non-traditional ways of collecting data, information, and knowledge will assist in determining these MOE.  That is, cyber collection operations will quickly find data, information, and knowledge, form relationships, form tentative conclusions, and present the possibilities (potentialities unbound by constraints) to the human handler.  Sensors need to “sniff” body chemicals to ascertain what psychological and physical state people are in.  Enhanced hearing and memory will greatly aid operatives engaging in HUMINT within a culture to determine the effectiveness of an IO campaign.  Agents have to discern obtuse connections between a leader’s decision-making, activities to execute the decision, and effects (outcomes) and relate them to measures of effectiveness.  Agents also have to discern the opponents MOE and MOP, particularly of their methods for obtaining feedback as to the quality and timeliness of their decisions.  Automation can be programmed to search for indicants of the strength of individual, organizational, or country will and how it fluctuates through the act, react, and counteract cycles of involvement in a conflict.

Ĝ      Conditions conducive to thinking will ascend in importance.  Enhanced thinking will become increasingly important in the effort to make better decisions than the adversary.  Along with improving intellects through learning and hardware/software implants, people will place increasing emphasis on using technology to enhance the thinking prowess of knowledge workers and leaders.  Basically, conditions have to be right to maximize human thinking and learning.  Some people, for example, think best when listening to baroque music.  Others believe listening to Mozart helps them think.  People will enter into altered states of consciousness to enhance their thought processes.   Computer software will diagnose conditions most conducive to achieving maximum effectiveness of thought.  Computer software will also quickly discern the best combinations of intellects and software to arrive at maximum effectiveness in decision-making.  The technology to bring enhanced thinking forward will range from simple deprivation tanks to sophisticated hardware/software implants to music, smell, and sound stimulants.  All organizations will have thinking rooms where knowledge workers can adjourn for thinking.  They will enter a world of virtual reality in which the way they think, create, and learn, as individuals is constructed for them using very smart software and powerful computers.

Conclusions

Knowledge Warfare is the next wave of conflict.  Knowledge Warfare involves struggles between and among antagonists for information and knowledge sufficient for making better decisions faster than adversaries do.  Asymmetric foes will wage Knowledge Warfare against the United States; therefore, the country must prepare for this type of conflict now.  The principal tools that asymmetric foes waging Knowledge War against the United States will use are the many faces of Information Operations.  In Knowledge Warfare, if an adversary can make faster and better decisions than their adversary, they will have the potential to affect will – individual, aggregates of individuals, leaders, and even an entire country could succumb to a determined and skilled waging of a Knowledge Warfare campaign.

What I have written about will take place in the future – some things will occur shortly, other things will occur further in the future.  Clearly, Knowledge Warfare and the technology and thinking I discuss are not totally in evidence today.  But it does not take much foresight to anticipate the ascendancy of this type of conflict and its support by technological development that is advancing exponentially.  My guess is that some of this type of conflict is happening right now, but it is in a very early and crude stage of development.  In the next ten to fifteen years, Knowledge Warfare will evolve and technologies coming into being will provide it with an immense and dangerous energy and wide range of capabilities.

Thus, I have concluded that the country needs to prepare for Knowledge Warfare now.  As such, the military needs to develop purposefully the intellects for waging and winning Knowledge Warfare.  Technology must enable the condition of information superiority to be found and sustained for it allows decision advantage to surface.  With decision advantage other advantages – intellect, knowledge, technology, position, and action – surface and become constants.  Who will make the decisions?  To be frank, there is discussion and debate about the type of leadership, intellectual capabilities, and planning skills people need to engage in Knowledge Warfare, asymmetric warfare, and information operations (IO).  Part of this discussion should involve how people think, how they process information, turn it into knowledge, and how they interact with computers.  Part of the discussion should involve the leadership skills people need for leading in a virtual, cyber environment.  Part of the discussion should involve what kind of minds will make the best decisions fastest in the environment I have discussed and the technology most conducive to assisting the human being make those effective, fast decisions.  Without equivocation, the country needs a progressive, coherent training and education system complete with simulation and modeling to replicate the cyber world to develop the type of leaders who will enter and win Knowledge Warfare battles looming in the future.

The military needs to get serious about entering and winning conflict in cyber space.  Some good progress has occurred, but much more is needed.  Intelligence collection and simulation of cyber space is in particularly need of improvement.  In this regard, I believe the military needs an Internet replicator (Fish Bowl) to train cyber warriors and to develop and experiment with some of the technological capabilities I have discussed, e.g., cyber bots.  In addition, the country needs a national Information Warfare Proving Ground where people who will wage Knowledge War can train as a joint team, scientists can develop technology and experiment, and leaders can work with Information Warfare weapons (lethal and non-lethal) still in nascent stages of development. 

Wayne M. Hall is a retired Army Brigadier General working part time as a consultant in future conflict, C4ISR, and Information Operations, and part time for BWXT Y12, L.L.C. in Oak Ridge Tennessee.