“We … are going to have to fashion a new vocabulary and different constructs for thinking about what it is we’re doing,” said U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld recently of the war against terrorism.
William M. Arkin of the Washington Post says Pentagon planners used war games completed last year to test a concept called Rapid Decisive Operations (RDO), which seeks “to achieve rapid victory by attacking the coherence of an enemy’s ability to fight.”
RDO games employed “asymmetric advantages in the knowledge, precision, and mobility” of the U.S. “to create maximum shock” and defeat a hypothetical country’s leader’s “ability and will to fight.”
In each game they attempted to create a “single, integrated, coordinated and synchronized ‘National Campaign Plan’ orchestrated by the White House.”
EBO uses technological advances in communications distribution, data-mining tools, graphical display, and social/demographic modelling tools similar to those used in advertising, marketing and political campaigns.
But planners say it requires better intelligence than the U.S. currently possesses.
Source: William M. Arkin, A New Mindset for Warfare, Washington Post, September 22, 2001.
For text http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8672-2001Sep22.html
For more on Technology/Terrorism http://www.ncpa.org/pi/congress/cong9.html
FMF\3 October 2001
