A wearables related story - from search.washingtonpost.com
Point Men for a Revolution
Can the Marines Survive a Shift From Hierarchies to Networks?
By Joel Garreau
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 6, 1999; Page A01
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif.—In a darkened room on this vast base, Lance Cpl. Jason Pautz, 19, of Fulton, Mo., is preparing to hit the beach in Monterey, 400 miles up the coast.
He and his Marine buddies will burst from their landing craft next Saturday, M-16s high, vests stuffed with ammo, into a sea of hungry, needy "civilians" speaking foreign languages, past actors impersonating CNN camera crews. They will be attacked by foes diabolically trained to fight like a Mogadishu clan -- people who intimately know the streets and one another. These Bad Guys will have a Weapon of Mass Destruction.
Before Pautz is an experimental weapon. It is a computer no wider than a spread hand. He will go into battle with it strapped to his chest. Antennas spring from his shoulders.
He can pop the computer open, look down, and there will be the screen, like a little fold-out tray. If he needs to enter something, he can tap on the keyboard. When he tucks his hands up to do this, he looks like a praying mantis.
The key to this weapon's power is that it is a network.
That's why the Monterey experiment, called "Urban Warrior," is far more than a war game. This exercise is not only about how technology will transform the way the Marines fight, but also how they think about who they are. It is about one of the big ideas of the Information Age -- the rise of human networks and the fall of hierarchies -- and about how this idea might reshape a traditional, top-down military organization. In that sense, the Marines' experiment serves as a case study for thousands of other organizations, from corporations to government, at the heart of America's economy and society.
The antennas coming out of Pautz's shoulders are supposed to connect him to the entire Marine Corps. The network hooks him to satellites overhead that, on a color map on Pautz's screen, instantly show him where he is, and where his buddies are. When he moves, his dot on the map moves. If he finds some Bad Guys and targets them, everybody can see. "Everybody" includes the pilots in the jet fighters overhead, the tacticians with the precision missiles on the ships over the horizon, and the cruisers with the Naval artillery. Soon, Pautz could plug binoculars with laser-range finders into the network, or a digital camera with cross hairs. Someday, he might talk to it. It might talk back.
As the young Marines training at Pendleton begin to see what this network can do, they start having a good time with it. One Marine marks his location and labels it "Don't kill me." This information blossoms on dozens of tiny chest screens around the room. Another location dot appears with the phrase "Sexy women are coming my way." A third Marine shows himself on the map and reports, accurately: "Everybody looks like a dork."
It's an open question how this network will perform in combat. But the implications are formidable.
Like many swords, this weapon cuts two ways.
An electronic network may give the Marines unprecedented flexibility, adaptability and competitiveness, but it may also fundamentally unravel the way the Marines have worked for more than 200 years.
This network rearranges power radically. It allows much to be pushed down to the grunts. " 'The strategic corporal,' we call him," says Gen. Charles Krulak, commandant of the Corps; "He's going to do amazing things." One young Marine will with his fingertips be able to call in awesome furies -- more carnage than an entire World War II company.
It also pushes power up to the generals. "A God's-eye view of the battlespace," is what they hope for, says Col. Robert E. Schmidle Jr., commanding officer of "Urban Warrior." Suppose every corporal becomes an intelligence agent, as well as a combatant. Suppose you can add to his situation reports those from the partisans on your side. Suppose you can deploy robots that add information, as well as the reports from unmanned aircraft. Suppose, back at the command location, computers will allow you to integrate all those reports and display the "battlespace" in a three-dimensional picture in real time, the way a future MRI might tell surgeons at the time they're operating what's going on inside a patient. Suppose that lets a commander on one side in a battle lift the "fog of war," so that he could actually see patterns in what his enemy was doing. Would that not be the biggest advantage since gunpowder?
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ABOUT THE ARTICLE
This is the first of two articles examining the future of human networks through the prism of the Marine Corps. The next will appear after the completion of "Urban Warrior."
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