Information technology and military performance

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 519-544).Militaries have long been eager to adopt the latest technology (IT) in a quest to improve knowledge of and control over the battlefield. At the same time, uncertainty and confusion have remained prominent in actual experience of war. IT usage sometimes improves knowledge, but it sometimes contributes to tactical blunders and misplaced hubris. As militaries invest intensively in IT, they also tend to develop larger headquarters staffs, depend more heavily on planning and intelligence, and employ a larger percentage of personnel in knowledge work rather than physical combat. Both optimists and pessimists about the so-called "revolution in military affairs" have tended to overlook the ways in which IT is profoundly and ambiguously embedded in everyday organizational life. Technocrats embrace IT to "lift the fog of war," but IT often becomes a source of breakdowns, misperception, and politicization. To describe the conditions under which IT usage improves or degrades organizational performance, this dissertation develops the notion of information friction, an aggregate measure of the intensity of organizational struggle to coordinate IT with the operational environment. It articulates hypotheses about how the structure of the external battlefield, internal bureaucratic politics, and patterns of human-computer interaction can either exacerbate or relieve friction, which thus degrades or improves performance. Technological determinism alone cannot account for the increasing complexity and variable performances of information phenomena. Information friction theory is empirically grounded in a participant-observation study of U.S. special operations in Iraq from 2007 to 2008. To test the external validity of insights gained through fieldwork in Iraq, an historical study of the 1940 Battle of Britain examines IT usage in a totally different structural, organizational, and technological context.(cont.) These paired cases show that high information friction, and thus degraded performance, can arise with sophisticated IT, while lower friction and impressive performance can occur with far less sophisticated networks. The social context, not just the quality of technology, makes all the difference. Many shorter examples from recent military history are included to illustrate concepts. This project should be of broad interest to students of organizational knowledge, IT, and military effectiveness.by Jon Randall Lindsay.Ph.D

All That is Solid Melts into Air Travel: Environments, Technologies, and the Modern Nation at Trans-Canada Air Lines

This dissertation explores how Trans-Canada Air Lines (1937-1965) built, maintained, and subverted what I call the “modern envirotechnical nation” in its public-facing discourse. Euro-Canadian national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been rooted in both the environment—Canada was imagined as very big and very cold—and communications technologies that allowed settlers to traverse long distances and transcend harsh climates. At first blush, these appear both contradictory and self-reinforcing. How can we, for example, celebrate Canada’s size while at the same time technologically annihilating distance? Although clearly commensurate, environmental and technological nationalisms must work for that commensurability, especially in modern, high modern, and late/postmodern Canada. I refer to this work, as well as the discursive products of that work, the “modern envirotechnical nation.” I work mainly with the airline’s public-facing material, including advertisements, publicity images, media reports, press releases, and speeches by executives and sympathetic politicians to explore this phenomenon. As a state airline, TCA was beholden to taxpayers and worked with government advertisers, which meant that it forwarded something of a state-sanctioned narrative of environment, technology, and nation and used its discourse to express larger anxieties about what it meant to be a modern Canadian. TCA worked throughout its first two decades to maintain the modern Canadian envirotechnical nation in this material. Ultimately, it was unable to reconcile the role of air travel in creating new relationships between space, place, time, and the everyday experience of mobility with this paradigm as high-powered jets took Canadians faster and farther than the “modern envirotechnical nation” would allow. I treat air travel in Canada as a high-modern megaproject, a state enterprise designed to forward collective visions of nature, technology, and nation through the implementation of large-scale infrastructure. Therefore, this dissertation brings together the historical study of modernity, business, and the relatively new field of “envirotech.” Bridging environmental history and the history of technology, “envirotech” sits at the nexus of nature, culture, technology, and power, allowing for a multivalent analysis of technological systems as mediators for human experiences with their environments. I push the boundaries of “envirotech” by interrogating the role of technology in changing perceptions of the environment; TCA’s public-facing articulations of the “modern envirotechnical nation” represented Canadian environments not just how they were, but how it ought to and appeared to be to the airline’s passengers