What will become of battlefield command in the years ahead? This question is at the heart of the US Army’s once-in-a-generation reforms now underway. In search of answers, the Army looks to Ukraine. Events there suggest at least two truths. One is that decentralized command, which the US Army calls mission command and claims as its mode, will endure as a virtue. A second is that future commanders will use artificial intelligence to inform every decision—where to go, whom to kill, and whom to save. The recently announced Army Transformation Initiative indicates the Army intends to act on both.
But from these lessons there arises a different dilemma: How can an army at once preserve a culture of decentralized command and integrate artificial intelligence into its every task? Put another way, if at all echelons commanders rely on artificial intelligence to inform decisions,
do they not risk just another form of centralization, not at the top, but within an imperfect model? To understand this dilemma and to eventually resolve it, the US Army would do well to look once again to the Ukrainian corner of the map, though this time as a glance backward two centuries, so that it might learn from a young redleg in Crimea named Leo Tolstoy.
What Tolstoy Saw
Before he became a literary titan, Leo Tolstoy was a twenty-something artillery officer. In 1854 he found himself in besieged port of Sevastopol, then under relentless French and British shelling, party to the climax of the Crimean War. When not tending to his battery on the city’s perilous Fourth Bastion, Tolstoy wrote dispatches about life under fire for his preferred journal in Saint Petersburg, The Contemporary. These dispatches,
read across literate Russia for their candor and craft, made Tolstoy famous. They have since been compiled as The Sebastopol Sketches and are considered by many to be the first modern war reportage. Their success confirmed for Tolstoy that to write was his life’s calling, and when the Crimean War ended, he left military service so that he might do so full-time.
No comments:
Post a Comment