http://www.technologyreview.com/article ... ot1104.asp
The problems the USA had with its doctrine should be studied by India. It is not the country that first pioneers a technology, but the one that perfects it that will attain mastery. The British invented the tank, but it took the Germans, who perfected the use of the tank with the Blitzkrieg.
India has a similar opportunity here.
This reflects on the implementability of Cold Start. If the most technologically advanced nation can't inform its troops of the location of the enemy constantly, what hope does Pakistan have? Clearly a surpise attack can occur without warning even if it is preceded by mobilization. As for the problems the USA faced:But Marcone says no sensors, no network, conveyed the far more dangerous reality, which confronted him at 3:00 a.m. April 3. He faced not one brigade but three: between 25 and 30 tanks, plus 70 to 80 armored personnel carriers, artillery, and between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi soldiers coming from three directions. This mass of firepower and soldiers attacked a U.S. force of 1,000 soldiers supported by just 30 tanks and 14 Bradley fighting vehicles. The Iraqi deployment was just the kind of conventional, massed force that’s easiest to detect. Yet “We got nothing until they slammed into us,” Marcone recalls.
India can run a dress rehearsal of its own software and hardware, and efforts to implement network centric warfare. These problems can be identified and fixed before beginning Cold Start.It was a problem all the ground forces suffered. Some units outran the range of high-bandwidth communications relays. Downloads took hours. Software locked up. And the enemy was sometimes difficult to see in the first place.
Biggest Vulnerability
This Achilles Heel of the USA will be worth remembering. Sometimes India is overawed by the USA unnecessarily. The USA implements some things well, but at the cost of neglecting too many other relevant details.
The right way to organize an Indian Cold Start strategy would be more like the model the USA followed in Afghanistan:High-level commanders had them, but the system for moving them into the field broke down. This created “a critical vulnerability during combat operations,” the report says. “There were issues with bandwidth, exploitation, and processes that caused this state of affairs, but the bottom line was no [access to fresh spy photographs] during the entire war.”
India has no shortage of alpha or metageeks. As the smaller forces of Cold Start have better training and equipment, it would be easier to replicate the Special Forces model, except on a considerably larger scale.Special-operations forces organized into “A teams” numbering no more than two dozen soldiers roamed the chilly mountains near the Pakistan border on horseback, rooting out Taliban forces and seeking al-Qaeda leaders. The teams and individuals were all linked to one another. No one person was in tactical command.
But despite the lack of generals making key decisions, each of these teams of networked soldiers had a key node, an animal once confined to corporate IT departments: the alpha geek, who managed the flow of information between his team and the others. The U.S. special forces also maintained a tactical Web page, collating all the information the teams collected. And this page was managed by a webmaster in the field: the metageek of all alpha geeks.