Instant Messaging: Changing Command and Control in War

Instant messaging (IM) has become the cornerstone of many business messaging systems because it enables information-sharing immediacy and hence real-time decision making. It has also become a fundamental military messaging system, and its first battlefield deployment has already occurred: the Iraq War.

We interviewed Robert Nesbit, general manager of the Mitre Corporation's Bedford, Massachusetts, operation. Mitre is a large government "think tank," and Nesbit shared with us some interesting details about the impact IM has had on military command and control:

You have to understand how wars are run. Typically, there are large command centers on the outskirts of the war zone with perhaps a 1,000 people. They are very hierarchically organized, largely due to hundreds of years of history. Everything is very formalized regarding approvals. The generals sit up on top (of the war room) in a booth that is somewhat like the luxury box in a stadium. They look out over the whole war room floor and have these big screens around them . For this [Iraq] war, we introduced in stant messaging and it completely blew away the traditional command and control lines the military had for the last 100 years.

The average floor person would be in four or five "chat rooms" at one time. Now, these aren't the same type of chat rooms as your teenage daughter would frequent, but they are based on essentially the same technology. One room would be the tanker chat room, another would be the ops chat room, another might be the predator assessment chat room. People on the floor could completely "piece together" operations simply by coordinating key personnel and activities among the main disciplines. One captain could get everything coordinated, all by himself, by sitting in front of a single computer screen with multiple chat sessions active. In the past, layers of control would introduce delays as commands had to go up and down the chains of command. This now is a real-time war. [Not unlike the supercharged competitive environments many businesses now face.]

So imagine, a new general comes in and goes down to the floor. He asks someone on the floor, "What are you doing?" He hears, "Well, we just found this high-value target and we diverted an F16, but he needed gas so we got on the tanker, then took out the target, brought in damage assessment and imaged the area, and we're now talking to the press leads." All of this took place via instant messaging.

Mitre developed its own instant messaging software for military applications that has one special and critical capability: real-time foreign-language translation (idiomatically correct). Nesbit explained that coalition forces in Iraq speak and operate in many different languagesPolish, Spanish, and Ukrainian, to name just a fewand therefore need to communicate in real time without built-in translation delays (which would be considerable if manual translation were required). "I'll admit, I was skeptical at first, until I saw it in operation. The system is quite clever. It is very difficult to translate a given language's various idioms, such as our 'whazup?' to something sensible in the target language. But it worked; it really did, and was critical to the success of the war." Here is real-time translingual text messaging at use on the battlefield. Imagine the barriers in our world that could be broken down through the use of Inescapable Data devices, networking, and IM with real-time translingual text messaging. Such a technological achievement could be as monumental as the invention of the printing press.

IM in the private sector is used for exactly the same purposebringing people together, shortening the time it takes to get problems resolved, and facilitating decision making, virtually. It is not uncommon in business to have a half dozen "chat" sessions going on simultaneously. Because the medium is perceived to be less formal than e-mail, messages tend to be short and to the point (and may even contain multiple typos and grammatical errors that would be unacceptable in more formal written communication). Many people approach writing an e-mail just as they do with more formal written communication, following the rules of correct spelling, punctuation, and syntax. Some people take as long to compose an e-mail message as it would take to make a brief phone to accomplish the same communication. IM circumvents that formality while preserving the asynchronicity of e-mail. IM messages are expected to be concise and not saved (and thus not scrutinized later). IM brings a "freedom" of communication and an associated efficiency. Perhaps even more importantly, however, it conveys a sense of virtual togetherness. Add real-time text translation and language barriers fall, and we all take a giant step closer to becoming members of a single world community.

"There are over 250 million IM users today," says Ken Kuenzel, CEO of Covergence, a start-up focusing on various real-time communication solutions. "This is expected to soar to 500 million by 2007," Kuenzel continues. If Kuenzel is correct, there will be half a billion users of a text-messaging technology within two years. Verizon alone processes more than 23 million text messages per day, and that is only a fraction of the traffic volume experienced in Europe and East Asia.^[1] Two billion messages a month is the norm for some countries.

^[1] Boston Globe, June 7, 2004.