At the moment, centralized human command-and-control norms make large militaries similarly fragile. They’ve gotten around this in recent decades by letting smaller, more autonomous parts take over when there are enough dead bodies, but this does not last long. The same problems in policy elsewhere continue within militaries. While elements of the military have seen this problem (it’s an old problem best explained by the writing of David Hackworth, Erwin Rommel, and B.H Liddell-Hart), they can’t really change it from the inside, so there’s been a shift toward retirees who’ve started consulting firms with an implicit aim of changing culture from the outside.
Progress in technology will yield the same problems that it did in the 60s (when militaries had access to better radio communication, they used it to try to enforce tighter control on their units while avoiding the ground- commanders literally flew in helicopters instead of having their boots on the ground): militaries will attempt to use that technology for more central control, which will continue making its systems more rigid and vulnerable to a sudden catastrophic failure.
At the moment, centralized human command-and-control norms make large militaries similarly fragile. They’ve gotten around this in recent decades by letting smaller, more autonomous parts take over when there are enough dead bodies, but this does not last long. The same problems in policy elsewhere continue within militaries. While elements of the military have seen this problem (it’s an old problem best explained by the writing of David Hackworth, Erwin Rommel, and B.H Liddell-Hart), they can’t really change it from the inside, so there’s been a shift toward retirees who’ve started consulting firms with an implicit aim of changing culture from the outside.
Progress in technology will yield the same problems that it did in the 60s (when militaries had access to better radio communication, they used it to try to enforce tighter control on their units while avoiding the ground- commanders literally flew in helicopters instead of having their boots on the ground): militaries will attempt to use that technology for more central control, which will continue making its systems more rigid and vulnerable to a sudden catastrophic failure.