Wired Fast and Thinking Slow: Cyber Technology and the U.S. Army - Increase in Speed and Quantity of Social Transactions, Inadequate Coverage of Implications of Cyberspace Through Military Doctrine

This report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. Understanding the impacts of cyber technologies on war and warfare is increasingly critical for a planner's ability to design and execute operational art. The purpose of this monograph is to examine how the U.S. Army describes cyberspace and the effects that cyber technologies have on military strategy and operational planning writ large. The work specifically examines how cyberspace increases the speed and quantity of social transactions over space with effects on military and social forces. Secondly it addresses how the Army recognizes the impact of cyber technology on identity formation and virtual identity of both friendly and enemy actors. The author concludes that society's and the Army's increasing dependence and activity in cyberspace marks a change in warfare that the Army has been slow to accept. Inadequate coverage of the implications of cyberspace throughout doctrine combined with insufficient emphasis in professional military education and training may limit the Army's potential in all levels of war.

Throughout recorded history, individuals and societies have had a fascination and a complex relationship with technology. Carl Sandberg's poem, "Under a Telephone Pole," is one such example from the twentieth century. The work personifies a telephone wire as being aware of its disparate uses— coursing with conversations that vary in substance — a tangible wire, essential for modern communication, considered ubiquitous, and taken for granted. Sandberg's poem illustrates the paradoxical nature of technology.

Prior to the electric telegraph, the speed of almost all information flow was limited to the speed at which a human or animal could travel. In 1858, the first transatlantic messages traveled between Europe and North America via underwater telegraph cables. This cable signaled the reduction of information transmission time from days to hours in the transatlantic space. Along with other technological advances in power and transportation, the transatlantic telegraph freed communication from the constraints of space and time and occasioned a revolution in the global economy and social order. For many, the increased scale of economic, diplomatic, and social interdependencies seemed to presage the inevitability of world peace. Instead, two world wars, a cold war, and scores of regional and local wars marked this unrealized vision.

Though underwater cables similar to those used by the first transatlantic telegraph endure as a critical element in the twenty-first century global communications infrastructure, wireless cyber technology now connects people, things, and systems virtually and instantaneously from and to locations across the globe. The pace of life continues to increase as perceptions of physical distances and time contract in a world simultaneously enlarged and shrunk by technology. Exponentially rapid technological progress now inspires utopian hopes similar to those generated by the telegraph, yet war perseveres as part of human experience.