COMMAND AND CONTROL... ALT-DELETE: NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND THEIR EFFECT ON LEADERSHIP

I can no longer obey; I have tasted command, and I cannot give it up.

“You are watching the most violent actions that man carries out, but you are not there. It’s antiseptic. It’s not as potent an emotion as being on the battlefield. You may get angry at seeing one of our guys get killed, but then it’s on to the next mission.”

Colonel Michael Downs entered the air force out of Texas A&M University. I first met the avid “Aggie” football fan when we shared a cubicle in an office inside the bowels of the Pentagon. Since he was an air force officer, the Pentagon in its infinite wisdom had assigned Downs responsibility for the landmine issue in the Balkans. The next time I saw him he was out in the Middle East, serving in a more traditional air force role as one of the key planners of the air operations for the early stages of the Iraq war, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star.

Downs then shifted over to Beale Air Force Base, located about forty miles north of Sacramento, California. Unlike most air bases, which are named after pilots, Beale is named in honor of the man who founded the Army Camel Corps in the 1840s. Given such an iconoclastic legacy, it is perhaps appropriate that today Beale is the home of the 9th Reconnaissance Wing, a unit that hosts much of the air force’s unmanned operations, as well as the 548th Intelligence Group, which helps analyze the information gathered by America’s fleet of unmanned drones.

Downs’s job at Beale as director of operations was to help lead and coordinate the high-altitude unmanned operations that took place around the globe. He sees “a strong future” in unmanned systems. “They are becoming a staple of what we do.” Trained as an intelligence officer, he appreciates how much they help with what is perhaps the most difficult task in modern-day war: simply locating the enemy. “We continue to make incredible progress on the kinetic part of war, to where our biggest challenge is no longer destroying targets, it’s finding them.” During the 2006 operation that killed al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, “It took over six hundred hours of surveillance work for roughly ten minutes of bomb-dropping work.”

Downs wants to make clear that those fighting from places like Beale are not some stereotype of “emotionless automatons who are detached from the impact of their work.” Instead, his pride in the men and women on his team shines through again and again. “They care deeply about what they do, why they do it, and give of themselves greatly for our country. They are consummate professionals.” Rather, Downs is growing concerned about how their leaders like himself will face the unfamiliar challenges that unmanned, distance warfare presents.

THE WAR AT HOME

The units like the one Downs led at Beale are not merely fighting from afar, but doing so 24/7, over long periods of time. “Maintaining the acute concentration and focus necessary for combat operations is difficult if you are doing the same thing every single day, day in and day out, for three, four, or six years in a row.”

He describes the challenge of keeping a “razor-sharp focus, consistently.” A commander has to be sure to continually reinforce the criticality of the mission to his troops, “so that they have the mental and emotional sense that they are in the battle space that they’re looking at.” Downs continues, “You try to give your team the context, make sure they link what they are doing here in the States to the broader cause, to see the importance of it, so six months in you don’t have people with their jaws on the keyboards.... I would tell my folks that when they stepped into our mission vans, that they were leaving California and stepping into Iraq or Afghanistan.”

Downs thinks that unmanned war, “while you can’t compare it to the experience on the ground,” also comes with a great deal of psychological stress and emotional connections, perhaps more than people might think that a so-called cubicle warrior would experience. He recalls an instance in which the crew of an unarmed Predator drone could only watch from above as insurgents killed a team of U.S. Special Forces operators. “It was tough on the young kids.... I worry about the young airmen. They don’t have the same life experience and support systems. They just go home and internalize it.”

Downs’s worry was later reinforced by a staff sergeant at another air base, who helps oversee the support of drone crews and mission planners. She similarly raised the issue of what the servicemen and -women under her care were experiencing, even while fighting from afar. “What angers me is that as a service, we are not doing a good job on PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. People are watching horrible scenes, it’s affecting people. Yet we have no systematic process on how we take care of our people.”

Another novel command challenge emerged from what is widely perceived as the greatest perk of distant war: fighting without leaving home. “Conducting continual combat operations from home station presents a unique set of stresses and challenges that we’ve not had to face until recently.” Downs is a married father of three children, who has deployed out on operations to dangerous places in the Middle East and the Balkans multiple times. So he knows the risks of an actual deployment to a combat zone and the accompanying heartache that comes from leaving loved ones behind. Yet, he explains, leaders are also starting to learn that commanding reachback operations at home comes with new issues that raise all sorts of leadership questions. “When you are deployed, the mission is your only job. When you are at home you still have the mission, but all the extras, plus the family.”

His unit may have been at home base, but it operated on a wartime schedule, conducting missions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. There are no weekends or holidays, and the pace can be grueling for the men and women he commands. Yet, while the war may be on, none of the pressures of the home front disappear. “You are at war, but at the same time you have Mom at home saying the toilet needs to be fixed. You need to be ready to execute combat missions, where lives are at stake, but still have church activities to go to, kids that need to be taken to the hospital, soccer practices, et cetera.”

Also, because they are fighting within a battle space physically located half a world away, the units adhere to a different time zone. Evening in Afghanistan is afternoon in Iraq is early morning in California. As the singer James Taylor might put it, for an unmanned unit, “It’s war o’clock somewhere.” Explains Downs, “Even when you are off, you’re out of sync with your family.”

This aspect of balancing fighting and family creates an almost psychological disconnect in how the units have to operate. “You see Americans killed in front of your eyes and then have to go to a PTA meeting.” Gary Fabricius, our Predator squadron commander, similarly cited this as perhaps the most surprising challenge of his early experience with unmanned war. “You are going to war for twelve hours, shooting weapons at targets, directing kills on enemy combatants, and then you get in the car, drive home, and within twenty minutes you are sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.”

With these different sorts of pressures, it is very tough for a leader to ensure his unit keeps its “battle rhythm” when it is still located at home. Says Downs, commanders particularly have to keep an eye out for young troops “burning the candle at both ends of the wick.”

This new generation of leaders like Downs is testing a variety of measures to try to help their forces operate at maximum efficiency and keep the two worlds separated. One is the banning of personal phone calls into the control rooms. When the soldiers are at war, they are kept in a communications bubble. Another idea is for reachback units to operate like many professional sports teams do before big games. Just like a football team before the Super Bowl, a unit rotating onto assignment might be sequestered at a hotel or barracks on base, isolated from their families during operations. This would create a bit more of a distinction between war time and home time, thinks Downs, as well as “keep them fresher and give more focus.”

Ultimately, Downs feels that the stakes of being at war still overwhelm what would seem to be the virtual nature of fighting it from home. I once asked him if it would ever be possible for warriors fighting unmanned wars from afar to leave their work back at the office, just like other professions can do. He paused for a half minute in silent reflection. He then responded, “You don’t really switch it off.”

TACTICAL GENERALS

The four-star general proudly recounts how he had spent “two hours watching footage” beamed to his office. Sitting behind a live feed of video from a Predator drone, he saw the two insurgent leaders sneak into a compound of houses. Then he waited as other insurgents entered and exited the compound, openly carrying weapons. He was now personally certain. Not only was the compound a legitimate target, but any civilians in the houses had to know that it was being used for war, what with all the armed men moving about. So, having personally checked out the situation, he gave the order to strike. But his role in the operation didn’t end there; the general tells how he even decided what size bomb his pilots should drop on the compound.

Much like Downs watching after his men and women at Beale, great generals also had to have an innate connection to the warriors fighting under their command. In his masterful history of men at war, The Face of Battle, John Keegan wrote how “the personal bond between leader and follower lies at the root of all explanations of what does and does not happen in battle.” In Keegan’s view, the exemplar of this was Henry V at the battle of Agincourt, who so inspired his “band of brothers” by fighting in their midst.

With the rise of each new communications technology, these connections between the soldiers in the field and those giving them battle orders began to be distanced. Generals were no longer at the same front lines as their men, but operated from command posts that moved farther back with each new technologic advance. And yet, describes analyst Chris Gray, the very same technologies also pushed a trend “towards centralization of command, and thus towards micromanagement.”

When telegraphs were introduced during the Crimean War (1853-56), generals back in England quickly figured out that they could now send in their daily plans to those on the front lines in Russia. And so they did. The advent of radio heightened this effect. Hitler, for instance, was notorious for issuing detailed orders to individual units fighting on the Eastern Front, cutting out the German army’s entire command staff from the process of leading its troops in war. Even the U.S. military has suffered from this problem. During the 1975 Mayagüez rescue attempt, considered the last battle of the Vietnam War, the commander on the scene received so much advice and so many orders from leaders back in D.C. that he eventually “just turned the radios off.”

These leaders never had access to systems like today’s Global Command and Control System (GCCS). As one report describes, “GCCS—known as ‘Geeks’ to soldiers in the field—is the military’s HAL 9000. It’s an umbrella system that tracks every friendly tank, plane, ship, and soldier in the world in real time, plotting their positions as they move on a digital map. It can also show enemy locations gleaned from intelligence.” When combined with the live video that various unmanned systems beam back, commanders are enabled by technology as never before. They are not just linked closer to the battlefield from greater distances, ending the separation of space, but the separation of time has also been ended. Commanders are not only able to transmit orders in real time to the lowest-level troops or systems in the field, but they can also see the action in real time. With a robotic system like a drone or SWORDS, that commander can see the exact same footage that the operator sees, at the exact same time, and even take over the decision to shoot.

Many people, especially the Cebrowski-led network-centric warfare crowd, thought that this linking together of every soldier and system into a vast IT network would decentralize operations, that it would allow for greater initiative among the lower-level units in war. Actual experience with unmanned systems is so far proving the opposite. The new technologies have also enabled the old trends of command interference to reach new extremes of micromanagement.

Too frequently, generals at a distance are now using information technology to interpose themselves into matters that used to be handled by those on the scene and at ranks far below them. One battalion commander in Iraq told how he had twelve stars’ worth of generals (a four-star general, two three-star lieutenant generals, and a two-star major general) tell him where to position his units during a battle. An army special operations forces captain even had a brigadier general (four layers of command up) radio him while his team was in the midst of hunting down an Iraqi insurgent who had escaped during a raid. The general, watching live Predator video back at the command center in Baghdad, ordered the captain where to deploy not merely his unit, but his individual soldiers. “It’s like crack for generals,” says Chuck Kamps, a professor at the Air Command and Staff College. “It gives them unprecedented ability to meddle in mission commanders’ jobs.”

Over the last few years, many analysts have discussed what marine general Charles Krulak called the rise of the “strategic corporal.” This idea was meant to describe how new technology put far more destructive power (and thus influence over strategic outcomes) into the hands of younger, more junior troops. A twenty-year-old corporal could now call in airstrikes that a forty-year-old colonel used to decide in the past. But these technologies are also producing something new, which I call the “tactical general.” While they are becoming more distanced from the battlefield, generals are becoming more involved in the real-time fighting of war.

As retired army colonel Robert Killebrew explains, the technology available to today’s senior commanders provides them with numerous “incentives to intervene tactically at the lowest levels.” That a general, who can now see what is unfolding on the ground, would want to shape it directly makes perfect sense. All sorts of battles have been lost when a general’s commands were misinterpreted or implemented wrongly by subordinates in the field. Who else better knows a commander’s intent than the commander? What is more, a general who stays on top of the situation can rapidly adjust his original commands to any changes that happen in the midst of battle, rather than letting old plans be carried out despite already being passed by events.

Unfortunately, unmanned systems are blurring the line between timely supervision and micromanagement. Retired air force lieutenant colonel Dan Kuehl points out that just because a general now can use a “5,000 mile long screwdriver” doesn’t mean he should. One interviewee, for example, described how officers hundreds of miles away would instruct him onto which roads he should turn down during raids in Afghanistan.

To the general who described spending two hours watching Predator footage of just one compound, this was time well spent. As the overall commander, he was going to be held accountable if the strike went awry. So if the technology allows, he believed that he should make sure it went exactly the way he wanted. But while this general was doing a job that normally would have been done by captains in the field, who was doing the general’s job? These new technologies allowed him to make tactical decisions as never before. But the captains, majors, colonels, and so forth that he was cutting out of the chain could not, in turn, devote themselves to the big strategic and policy questions that the general would have been wrestling with instead.

Moreover, “tactical generals” often overestimate how much they really know about what is happening on the ground. Operation Anaconda, the 2002 battle when the 10th Mountain Division took on Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in the Shah-i-Khot valley in Afghanistan, was one of the first battles in which generals back in the States could watch a battle play out live, beamed back to them by a Predator drone that flew above the fight. The danger, explains Major Louis Bello, the fire support coordinator for the 10th Mountain Division, is that the video tends to be “seductive,” leading commanders to focus in on what the drone beamed back as if it were the whole story. “You get too focused on what you can see, and neglect what you can’t see,” Bello said. “And a lot of the time, what’s happening elsewhere is more important.”

Jumping in and out of the tactical issue, rather than working it day to day, senior officers don’t have the local context and also tend to interpose their assumptions onto the video they see. During the battle, for example, American commanders saw live video of al-Qaeda fighters moving across a mountain. Even though the footage was staring them in the face, the commanders thought they were seeing Americans, as that was who they expected to see there based on their original plans.

Misunderstanding from afar can even be heightened by technology. During the 2003 Iraq invasion, for example, the overall commander, General Tommy Franks, reportedly became obsessed with the “Blue Force Tracker” map. This was a massive electronic display that showed the exact locations and status of every U.S. unit, as well as the Iraqi units facing them. The appearance of so much information proved deceptive, however. At one stage early in the fight, it looked to Franks like several units in the Army’s V Corps were neither moving nor fighting. The tracking map showed no Iraqi units nearby and so Franks reportedly flew off the handle. He tracked down his land forces commander, who in his words was then made to eat “a shit sandwich.”

There was only one problem: General Franks was reportedly looking at the electronic map on the wrong scale. If he had just increased the map’s resolution, he would have seen that while the American units may have looked like they were alone at the large scale in the map, they were in actuality locked in one of the toughest battles of the entire invasion, fighting against a swarm of Saddam Fedayeen teams. These small insurgent units were big enough to give the U.S. invasion fits, but not big enough to get their own logos on the high-tech map that the general far from battle was watching.

Most of all, officers in the field lament what they call the “Mother may I?” syndrome that has come with these new technologies. Rather than relying on the judgment of their highly trained officers, generals increasingly want to inspect the situation for themselves. It’s all fine if the enemy plays along and gives that general several hours to watch the video himself and decide which bomb to use. But sometimes matters aren’t decided on a general’s schedule. An air force officer in the Middle East described his ultimate frustration being when he had information that could have saved lives, but “it sat in someone’s e-mail queue for six hours.” Similarly, one Predator pilot complains, “It’s the old story—by the time you have all the evidence, it’s too late to affect the outcome.”

Ultimately, these problems put a new wrinkle on a venerable truism of war. As Napoleon once said, “One bad general is better than two good ones.” The traditional concept of a military operation is a pyramid, with the strategic commander on top, the operational commanders next, and the tactical commanders on the bottom layer. With the new technologies, this structure isn’t just being erased from above, with strategic and operational commanders now getting into the tactical commanders’ business. It is also endangered from the sides. As one drone squadron officer explains, a major challenge in the command and control of reachback operations is their simultaneous location in multiple spaces. The drones may be flying over Iraq, but they are launched out of a base in the Persian Gulf, and flown by men sitting back in Nevada. At each of those locales, “each commander thinks he’s in control of you.” Even worse, the drones are a high-demand asset, for which everyone is clamoring.

The results are “power struggles galore.” As the operations are located around the world, it is not always clear whose orders take priority. The units instead would get “pulled in many directions because you are in virtual space. Am I at Nellis or am I at CENTAF [the air command in the Middle East]?”

Moreover, by giving everybody in the command structure access to the Internet, the ability to watch what is going on and to weigh in on what the units should be ordered to do is not limited just to where a unit is physically or virtually located. During the Shah-i-Khot battle, for instance, video of the fighting was beamed from the Predators to bases and offices all over the world. Army major general Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, the commander of U.S. ground forces during the battle, recalls how “disruptive” this was, as officers all around the world now felt that “they were in a position to get involved in the battle.” While his team was trying to actually fight the battle in Afghanistan, “people on other staffs at higher levels would call all the way down to my staff and get information and make suggestions.” In the midst of battle, some officers back in the States even called in asking for information that they could plug into their own generals’ daily briefings, pestering soldiers fighting “for details that they presumed their bosses would want to know.”

Each of these tasking orders is tough to ignore. Not only do they come in from senior leaders, who can make or break careers, but they also tend to come in on a “priority basis.” The various generals around the world tend to use a logic that humorist Garrison Keillor cited in Lake Wobegon Days. Every single one of them, of course, thinks that they and their missions and orders must be the ones of “above average” importance. But not everyone actually is. This “flattening of the chain of command,” says retired lieutenant general William Odom, causes “constipated communication channels” and “diarrhea of the email” that distracts troops from the mission at hand.

At its worst, this pattern can lead to the battlefield version of too many cooks spoiling the meal. A marine officer recalls, for example, that during an operation in Afghanistan, he was sent wildly diverging orders by three different senior commanders. One told him to seize a town fifty miles away. Another told him to seize just the roadway outside of the town. And the third told him, “Don’t do anything beyond patrol five miles around the base.”

The marine in this case ultimately chose “curtain number one” and seized the town. A veteran of the 1991 Gulf War, he felt confident enough to take the career risk of going with his gut. But the rise of virtual command from afar threatens to hollow out the experience of those who will be moving into these command roles in the future. Explains one Predator squadron commander, “You may have some general officer sitting behind four Toshiba big screens [TVs] with greater knowledge of the battlefield from the distance. And maybe it works the first time when they intervene and save the day. But my worry is what happens with the next generation. What happens when that lieutenant, who learns thinking the guys in the back are smarter, becomes a colonel or a general. He’ll be making the decisions, but not have any experience.”

Some worry that the ability to reach into the battlefield could even prove tempting to those outside the military. Marine veteran Bing West expects that “in the near future . . . a president will say, ‘Why do we need these twenty links in the chain of command?’ ” As West explains, the enhanced connections could certainly help the commander in chief become better informed about the true situation on the ground, but could prove catastrophic if civilian leaders are tempted to intervene, “trying to play soldier.” Referring to how President Johnson often tried to influence air operations in Vietnam, Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne warned that “it’ll be like taking LBJ all the way down into the foxhole.”

DIGITALLY LEADING

“You know what makes leadership?” asked Harry Truman. “It is the ability to get men to do what they don’t want to do and like it.” So the “techniques of leadership” that generals needed in the past were both physical and psychological. A general might lead by example, like Henry V, exposing themselves to danger at the head of a charge. Or they might inspire by appealing to soldiers’ moral centers, by demonstrating what marine colonel Bryan McCoy calls “the passion of command.” Or they even might try to play on soldiers’ pride, such as how Patton would publicly embarrass his officers by cussing them out in front of their men, in order to try to spur all to action.

These qualities are all in stark contrast to how science fiction portrays the generals of the future, as they use more and more unmanned systems. For example, a Star Wars novel described a general commanding unmanned systems in a galaxy far, far away. He sees his role as only to make cold calculations of costs and benefits, as he moves robotic units around like a computerized game of chess. “Commanding an army of droids was more like playing a game than engaging in actual combat. [By comparison] living soldiers bled and died, had to be fed, experienced morale problems, knew fear and all the other emotions common to beings who could think.”

Such a general is fortunately still fiction but it is becoming clear that twenty-first-century generals will have to bring new skills to increasingly unmanned wars. When the U.S. Army War College studied what would make a good general in this new century, it found that new technologies are creating an environment “where the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war can at times be so compressed as to appear virtually as a single function.” The downside of this “compression” is that it tempts officers to micromanage (the “tactical general” problem). However, officers who have what Clausewitz called the “eye of command,” who can find the right balance, will achieve “simultaneous awareness” of what is going on at all the levels of war, and make the appropriate decisions.

This isn’t going to be easy. For one thing, all the information being collected, all the requests taking place in real time, and all the general “diarrhea of the email” threaten to flood officers with what the army study described as an “avalanche of data.” Much like a corporate drone in his office cubicle, the twenty-first-century general will have to develop the ability to manage his in-box. Notes the report, “The strategic leader best adapted for the Information Age will be one with a retentive but discriminating mind, capable of separating the essential from that which is interesting and acting with confidence on his or her conclusions.”

Part of how this problem of information overload will likely be managed is developing a “knack for enlightened control.” Generals will literally have the entire battle at their fingertips. They can watch nearly every single action and make every minute decision. But technology still cannot give them an infinite amount of time. At some point, the leader has to turn matters over their subordinates. The general who can figure out when to intervene and when to delegate down the chain of command, and even more, to empower their junior troops to act with initiative in the absence of micromanagement, will be far more successful than the general who doesn’t trust their force to do anything without them.

Good generals will also need the mental flexibility to lead a “learning organization” that can adapt to changing circumstances in something beyond just a top-down manner. They will not only have an open mind themselves, but also be willing to let their subordinates wrestle with new concepts and new technologies. Describes Colonel Paul Harig of the U.S. Army War College, “I speculate that the digital general some 35 years from now might not just communicate differently but will actually think differently from his or her predecessors, because conceptual behavior itself is evolving during the Information Age.”

While a general may no longer have to be as fit a fighter as his troops, the way a Henry V was, the new technologies do impose certain physical requirements on commanders in wartime. For one thing, the U.S. military is finding that generals had better have “hands-on skill” at using a computer, something that once seemed an almost abhorrent concept to leaders. Writes an army report, “To the strategic commander of the Information Age, the laptop computer, or its successor, will be a natural extension of his mind, as familiar as the telephone, map, and binoculars. Aspiring future commanders who are not already computer literate take note.”

Another physical shift comes from wars being no longer limited by geography or time. While command has always been taxing, it is now becoming literally a 24/7 job. The kind of strength needed to wield a sword may no longer be required of generals. But they may now need the physical and psychological stamina of a twenty-two-year-old medical student on call in the ER.

Some of these changes might seem immense, but they will not supplant many of the same qualities that made great generals in the past. For example, the idea of “enlightened control,” giving just enough guidance to officers closer to the scene so that they can figure what to do best, is nothing new. The great Prussian generals of the nineteenth century were big believers in its equivalent. They called this Führen durch Auftrag, “leading by task,” as opposed to Führen durch Befehl, “leading by orders.” Their ideal was that the best general gave his officers the objective and then left it to them to figure out how best to achieve it. The most famous of these was before the 1864 Prussian invasion of the Danish province of Schleswig, where the commanding general so trusted his officers that the only order he supposedly issued was “On February 1st, I want to sleep in Schleswig.”

While this may be a bit too succinct for modern war, the example of General George Marshall, the overall commander of the U.S. Army during World War II, remains an apt model for twenty-first-century leaders. New inventions like the radio and teletype gave him an enhanced ability to instruct from afar, but Marshall’s approach was to set the broad goals and agenda, have smart staff officers write up the details of the plan, but ensure that everything remained simple enough that a lieutenant in the field could understand and implement everything on their own. Similarly, marine general James Mattis’s guidance to his troops before the 2003 invasion of Iraq was just as brief, understandable, and worthy. “Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.”

When the army surveyed almost five hundred generals and colonels about what traits officers would need in the twenty-first century, they identified such qualities as “flexibility,” “adaptability,” “political astuteness,” “ability to conceptualize,” “skill in resource management,” and “caring leadership.” As Colonel Harig of the War College put it, “In the end, it could be argued, all great commanders are the same. They adapt the technology of their times in a highly personal, reflective space where machines can extend, but never supplant, the human dimension of their leadership.”

GENERAL 2 . 0

Every decision in a military operation, whether it is the corporal (or robot) in the field deciding whether to pull the trigger or General Eisenhower deciding whether to give the “go” for the D-Day invasion, can be broken down into four basic parts. Folks in the military call these the “OODA loop,” short for “observe, orient, decide, and act.” Information is gathered, the situation figured out, orders issued, and action taken. Then the whole OODA cycle begins again.

The challenge is that technology is shrinking the time inside this decision cycle. Massive amounts of information are coming in faster, and decisions have to be made quicker as a result. This is what led, for example, to defense against mortars and rockets in Iraq being turned over to the R2-D2-like CRAM automated gun system. Humans just couldn’t fit into the shorter OODA loop needed to shoot down rockets.

This shortening of time in the decision cycle is working up the chain to the generals’ level. Marine general James Cartwright, chief of the U.S. Strategic Command (the part of the military that controls the nukes), predicts that “the decision cycle of the future is not going to be minutes. The decision cycle of the future is going to be microseconds.”

And thus many think there may be one last, fundamental change in the role of commanders at war. As a 2002 army report posits, “The solution to this problem may come from automated systems that have enhanced artificial intelligence. Unmanned systems will capitalize on artificial intelligence technology gains to be able to assess operations and tactical situations and determine an appropriate course of action.” If the first step of technology’s effect on command and control is to force officers to learn how to lead troops fighting from home bases, and the second is to make generals have to figure out when to intervene directly in the battle or not, the final step may be figuring out just which command roles to leave to people and which to hand over to machines.

The world is already awash with all sorts of computer systems that help us sift through information, and decide matters on our behalf. Your e-mail likely filters out junk mail that you don’t need to read, while billions of dollars are traded on the stock market by AI systems that decide when to buy and sell based only on algorithms.

The same sort of “expert systems” are gradually being introduced into the military. DARPA, for example, has created the Integrated Battle Command. The system gives military officers “decision aids”—AI that allows a commander to visualize and evaluate their plans, as well as predict the impact of a variety of effects. For example, the system helps a command team building a military operational plan to assess the various interactions that will take place in it, so that they can see how changing certain parameters might play out in direct and indirect ways so complex that a human would find them difficult to calculate. The next phase in the project is to build an AI that plans out an entire campaign. Similarly, “battle management” systems have been activated that provide advice on actions an enemy might take and potential countermoves, even drawing up the deployment and logistical plans for units to redeploy, as well as creating the command orders that an officer would have to issue. The military intelligence officer version of this is RAID (the Real-Time Adversarial Intelligence and Decision-making), an AI that scans a database of previous enemy actions within an area of operations to help “provide the commander with an estimate of his opponent’s strategic objectives.” The Israeli military is even fielding a “virtual battle management” AI. Its primary job is to support mission commanders, but it can take over in extreme situations, such as when the number of incoming targets overwhelms the human.

The raw processing power and memory of such systems can offset the problems of information overload that so trouble human commanders. Because searching though data and then processing it takes too much time, human commanders without such aids have to pick out which data they want to look at and which to ignore. Not only does this inevitably lead them to skip the rest of the information that they don’t have the time to cover, but humans also tend to give more weight in their decisions to the information they see first, even if it is not representative of the whole. The result is “satisficing.” They tend to come out with a satisfactory answer, though not the optimal answer. One air force officer described how each morning he received a “three-inch-deep” folder of printouts with the previous night’s intelligence data, which he could only skim through quickly before he had to start assigning missions. “A lot of data is falling on the floor.”

Emotions also can shape decisions, even the most major military ones. Recent neurological findings indicate that emotions drive our thought processes, including leaders’ political decisions, to a greater extent than has been previously recognized. That is, our idealized concept of how decisions are made in war and politics—rationally weighing the evidence to decide how and when to act—does not tell the full story of how human leaders’ brains actually work.

Stephen Rosen is a Harvard professor who consults for senior leadership at the Pentagon. In his book War and Human Nature, he describes how two under-rated factors have frequently shaped strategic choices in war. The first are powerful emotional experiences that leaders had in the past. These often steered their decisions, even decades afterward, including even decisions on whether to go to war. The second factor was how body chemistry affected one’s state of mind. Those with high levels of testosterone, for instance, were more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior and risk-taking; Custer and Patton seem classic examples. By contrast, those with low levels of serotonin are more prone to depression and mood swings; Hitler and Lincoln both were known for such. As these examples show, emotions can shape a leader’s decisions for both the better and the worse, so to pull emotions out of the equation could yield widely divergent results.

Leaving aside that such artificial decision systems are how AIs invariably take over the world in movies like The Terminator, machine intelligence may not be the perfect match for the human realm of war. “The history of human conflicts is littered with examples of how military forces achieved results that no algorithm would have predicted,” tells an air force general. And he is right. It may seem just like a game of chess to some, but war doesn’t have a finite set of possible actions and a quantifiable logic of zeros and ones. Instead, as one writer put it, “In war, as in life, spontaneity still prevails over programming.”

Even so, the Pentagon’s work on such programs continues. Many think that the most likely result for future command and control is a parallel to the “warfighters’ associate” concept of mixed teams of soldiers and robots fighting in the field. Their future commanders back at base will soon also have a staff that mixes advice from human officers as well as AI. Colonel James Lasswell of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab thinks that the various technological decision aids will likely evolve into an AI “alter ego” for the commander. A sort of artificial aide-de-camp, the technology would “automatically send and collate information for him to have at his beck and call.”

A real-world example of this under development now in DARPA is the “PETE” (Professional, Educated, Trained, and Empowered) virtual electronic assistant. PETE wouldn’t just gather and collate information for the human commander but would also execute orders and even liaise with other commanders’ virtual assistants, creating a network of PETEs. The developers envision a resulting split in how the team of a human commander and his AI commander’s associate would handle the OODA loop; with each focusing on what they do best, PETE might perform as much as 90 percent of the Observe (gathering data), 70 percent of the Orient (making sense of the data), but maybe as little as 30 percent of the Decide, and 50 percent of the Action (issuing orders).

Since the beginnings of war, leaders have described the responsibilities of command as feeling like the weight of the world was on their shoulders. Whether it’s an officer like Mike Downs having to figure out how to support his team of cubicle warriors or a future general having to decide just how much to integrate the advice of a machine into his battle plans, unmanned systems are lifting some of these burdens of command, while adding many new ones. Machines may not yet be making command decisions in war, but they are certainly shaping them as never before.