Hi-Tech Hits the Military's Training Ground

Lt Colonel James Cashwell at the computer in a Humvee (Photo: Joe Barrentine)

If there's a human face to the Army's effort to transform, it's Lt. Colonel James Cashwell, whose short cropped blond hair, bright blue eyes, and square jaw belong on a recruiting poster.

And if the Army has a new article of faith, it's technology. Cashwell stands in front of a confusion of computer cables, keyboards and monitors that display his mock battlefield on the sprawling training range at Yakima, Washington. The blue icons on the screens represent his 500 troops. The red ones are the enemy.

"The days of throwing up the map board are a thing of the past, because it gave nowhere near the awareness of the situation you get now," he says. "This gives us 100 percent situational awareness all the time."

It's a new world where the cryptic military jargon is made more incomprehensible by the geeky language of techno-speak. The company's executive officer describes his "tactical operations center" in language peppered with terms like "imbedded commands," "Internet protocols," "Windows NT systems," and "HTML products."

What it all adds up to, according to Colonel Cashwell, is a steady stream of real time battlefield information from satellites, aircraft, scouts, and intelligence officers, all linked through small remote computers, like the one inside his dusty humvee.

Barry Posen-

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He says the beauty of the new system is that information is shared instantaneously, and that as soon as he knows something, "every single person staring at the screen can see it."

This is the first of six Interim Combat Brigade Teams that will be ready to deploy by the spring of 2003. The Army says its $7.5 billion plan will allow it to deploy a 5,000 soldier unit anywhere in the world within 96 hours. Barry Posen, with MIT's program of Security Studies, says these brigades would have helped in places like Bosnia or Kosovo. "It will make these forces much more capable of doing low to mid-intensity kinds of conflicts, including fairly in-your-face kinds of peace enforcement missions," says Posen.

But he is skeptical of the light armored vehicles, which are more vulnerable and pack much less firepower than the large tanks they'll replace. "Where I think the Army is engaged in a kind of fantasy is that this unit will also be capable of waging war against a mechanized force. Fifteen to twenty ton vehicles are not going to be capable of jousting with a 70 ton tank," he says. "They're just not."

Giving up their M1-A1 was a shock to some of the tankers at Fort Lewis, but Lt. Colonel Cashwell, who used to command tanks, says better technology will allow these new lighter brigades to fight more effectively, even without the tanks.

"That is the whole point of the IBCT," he says, because "with that information dominance, you don't need to have a 70 ton tank." To illustrate what the change means, Cashwell contrasts formations on a soccer field to those on a football field. On the battlefield of the future, he says the game will go to the nimble.

Next: The Pro's and Con's of a "Revolution in Military Affairs."