Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/507045
T Technology 34 APRIL/MAY 2015 www.vanguardcanada.com sion. We have seen it in different ways in Iraq 2.0, Iraq 3.0 and Af- ghanistan. And we see it both from military and political leaders. I recall a four-star proudly telling me that he personally decided what size bomb should be on a certain mission, whether to strike or not strike a certain compound based on what he saw in the Predator drone feed that he'd watched for multiple hours in his command centre. He was saying this to show that he was taking personal responsibility, that if something went wrong he would be held accountable, but there was also a little bit of, I'm smarter than everybody else. He wasn't trained as a JAG or as a targeting offi cer, but even if he got it right, he's doing someone else's job and that person can't do the general's job. We've heard pilots in Iraq 3.0 say they have never been more frustrated in their careers because of how targets are being vetted all the way up to the level of the White House. What happens when the network goes down and you have a generation that has been trained this way and there's always some- one above watching and taking over the decisions. What if it's not like that? Q Do you have a sense of what this technology is doing to doctrine, how it is being adapted to this environment? Earlier today I actually met with a group from the British military wrestling with that very question. Everybody is wrestling with it, including the Russians and the Chinese. One of the lessons I have drawn from my work is that there are many echoes of the period surrounding the First World War. There were a whole se- ries of science fi ction-like technologies becoming real and being introduced into war, whether it was the tank, the aeroplane or the submarine, and they provoke all sorts of tough questions for everything from tactics to strategy, to law, to ethics, to doctrine. Doctrine is not just about what you do, but who does it and what status do they have within that military. So the debate back then over armoured doctrine was not just about the best way to use the tank, it was about what it meant for horse cavalry and the infantry. We have a similar process going on right now, whether it is with cyber warfare or with the introduction of unmanned systems. I would argue that the lesson from that period that will perhaps hold true is that the winner will not necessarily be the fi rst to get the technology, or the one with the best technology, or the most of the technology; it will be the one who is able to package it together with the correct doctrine. Building and implementing new doctrine is messy and incredibly painful and you don't know whether it has really worked or not until the worst possible moment. Q Has the success of UAVs changed how commanders view this technology? Yes and no. It is a technology that was once looked at as science fi ction more than science experiment. Commanders once asked what it was good for and now it's the most in-demand system for ISR and strike capabilities, whether it's ground troops in Afghani- stan or theatre commanders in the Pacifi c. That said, I was recently chatting with someone who described a battle going on right now between manned and unmanned in future acquisitions, and he noted that manned is winning. He went down a long list of examples of the next generation of weap- on systems, such as combat aircraft, where we had a choice and we kept choosing manned again and again. And the reason was not based solely on the capability of the system, but was invariably shaped by everything from organizational culture to big business, to promotions. This is not unlike the debates in the 1930s over horse cavalry versus mechanized or battleships versus aircraft carriers. You also have Clayton Christiansen's idea of the innovator's dilemma, that the fi rst generation of a technology, even when it is a game-chang- ing technology, is invariably the worst of it and has a hard time displacing what is already there. That is the dilemma big organiza- tions typically get caught in and why they get their lunch eaten by some upstart. The question is, is that going to be our militaries? Q Is this generational change? It may be generational but it also points to organizational struc- tures. Q In conversations you have had for your books, is there an emerging view as to how we should manage the ethics of robotics, of space or cyber? I think at this stage we want to identify the technologies that are no longer science fi ction – don't deny them but don't overplay them – so that we are scientifi cally informed. And second, we want to have a debate that is ethically informed – not the ethical version of the ostrich with its head in the sand as we saw with past generations of game-changing technology like atomic weapons. We can't ignore the scientifi c, the technological possibilities or the legal and ethical aspects. But we have to remember that this debate is taking place within the realm of confl ict where both sides get a vote. I'm reminded that there are a lot of things that we say we will never do, yet we change our mind based on what other actors do or how we are doing in a confl ict. I use the illustration of unrestricted submarine warfare. It was once a science fi ction tech- nology, then prior to WWI Arthur Conan Doyle writes a short story warning about the risk of an enemy conducting a submarine blockade of Great Britain. The Admiralty goes public to mock him for this outrageous, silly idea, saying roughly: no nation would choose to do this. In fact, if any captain did so their own navy would put them up against a wall and shoot them. Just a few months later, war breaks out and Germany conducts unrestricted warfare. And unrestricted submarine warfare is considered so against the norms of the day that it is the primary reason why the U.S. decides to enter WWI a couple of years later. Move forward to 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor: it took us fi ve hours to change our mind on unrestricted submarine warfare. Five hours after the attack, the order goes out to the entire U.S. fl eet: con- duct unrestricted submarine warfare against the Japanese, and no one questions it.