What You Don't Know Will Kill You

[John Young]

Hans Mark, a septugenarian DoD official in a seminar at Harvard 
on "Intelligence, Command and Control," in Spring 2000 said:

  "It is as bad to have too much information as it is not to have any. 
  Both contribute to Clausewitzs fog of war. It is not good to have a 
  completely transparent communications system. The private does 
  not need to know what the general knows. In fact, if the private knew 
  what the general knows, he might not want to go over the next hill."

Mark says he believes in unquestioned command authority as the 
most essential quality of the military, over weapons, strategy,
tactics and intelligence.

He acknowledged that commanders made mistakes but that history
has shown the validity of supreme command authority.

Elsewhere one reads that commanders are taught that casualties
are inevitable in war and that the resolute commander will not
hesitate to order an action that will certainly cause death.

Corollary of Mark's moral: be a commander never a follower or, best,
avoid heirarchies of rank and their promugators. Better than best
is to destroy heirarchies.

For getting followers to obey commands requires bountiful deception
and betrayal. That is called morale building, esprit de corps, patriotism, 
putting the nation, the unit, your comrades above your self-preservation.

Believers in heirarchies get really pissed when you question their
authority, and will kill you to show who is boss, or more likely order
an underling commander to order a blind faith warrior to do it with
a stand-off weaponry created for cowards.

Check out the NY Times Magazine's featured piece tomorrow on the 
US plan to command the world through space weaponry. All doomsday
gadgets commanded from Earth by e-generals pushing Linux sysadmins'
buttons with dreams of generalship for all just over the hill.

Why is command-authority IBM, Oracle and Sun getting so deeply in bed 
with the Linux mavericks under cover of combating Microsoft?