Knowledge is power, and today's age of the "information revolution" calls for new ways of attaining and controlling knowledge. Joint Vision 2010 is built on the premise that modern and emerging technology—particularly information-specific advances—should make possible a new level of joint operations capability. Sun Tzu reminds us, "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril." His timeless vision is about information superiority—the capability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or denying an adversary's ability to do the same. This is the central precept of JV 2010.
Information is a critical element of mission accomplishment for peace operations such as Joint Endeavor. First, a successful information campaign contributes to building and preserving public support for the operation. Second, the successful use of information can help the commander achieve operational goals by influencing parties, resolving crises, defusing misunderstandings, and correcting misperceptions. Such use of the information "weapon" will be more critical in peace operations where the traditional military tools (weapons) have a less central role in military activities. For Joint Endeavor, achieving "information dominance" through the employment of advanced information technology became a powerful tool in shaping the operational environment and helping the NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR) successfully monitor the Former Warring Factions and enforce compliance with the Dayton Peace Accords. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Major General William Nash, the first commander of Task Force Eagle and Multinational Division North, observed that in Bosnia, "We don't have arguments. We hand them pictures, and they move their tanks."
The "CNN effect," coupled with the information revolution, creates formidable challenges for the military. Peace operations, in particular, require a more sophisticated understanding on the part of the military and civilian officials of news media behaviors and a more intricate melding of military, political, and public affairs objectives. In Bosnia, there was media presence throughout the country when IFOR arrived. The modern information networks serving the media, IFOR, and its coalition member nations (and as a matter of fact, the rest of the free world) provided an ability to share information at a speed and efficiency never before experienced. The problem soon became one of finding the useful details among the wealth of information available rather than a lack of information.
The U.S. Department of Defense has been successfully exploiting rapidly developing advances in information technology for military gain and Bosnia provided a unique opportunity to collect experiences in and insights into the use of advanced information technology in a multifaceted, first-time-ever NATO-led coalition peace support operation. Lessons were learned as NATO, the United States, and its allies and the other coalition members of IFOR took on the challenge of transforming, in real time, a go-to-war designed military capability into one to support the needs of a complex peace operation. This transformation included the integration of disparate military C4ISR systems and services and commercial services into the largest "federated" military information system ever built. E-mail, PowerPoint briefings, and video teleconferencing became the instruments of command and control.
Public Affairs, Civil Affairs, PSYOP, Counterintelligence, Human Intelligence, and the IFOR Information Campaign emerged as key players and initiatives in Joint Endeavor. Dealing with non-governmental, private volunteer, and international organizations was new for NATO and many of its coalition partners and real-time adjustments were made to accommodate the humanitarian, economic, and civil reconstruction support aspects. Bosnia was a technology test bed as well, and served to further the U.S. DoD vision to apply advanced military information technology to support peace operations and to help achieve the JV 2010 vision of information superiority for joint operations.
This book tells the story of the challenges faced and innovative actions taken by NATO and U.S. personnel to ensure that IFOR and Operation Joint Endeavor were military successes. A coherent C4ISR lessons learned story has been pieced together from firsthand experiences, interviews of key personnel, focused research, and analysis of lessons learned reports provided to the National Defense University team. The book provides numerous examples that support the observation that DoD's vision is working for the Bosnia operation. However, much work remains to be done to achieve information superiority and the realization of JV 2010. The success of the IFOR operation was a major step forward, but this step was not due to technology alone. It was due mainly to the efforts of the dedicated, professional, and innovative men and women of the military, government, and contractors who were there and those who supported them.
Anthony M. Valletta
(Acting) Assistant Secretary of Defense C3I
| Bosnia Index | Foreword | Acknowledgments | Preface | I. Introduction | II. Bosnia—Setting the Stage | III. Command and Control Structure | IV. Intelligence Operations | V. Civil-Military Cooperation | VI. The International Police Task Force | VII. Information Activities | VIII. Tactical PSYOP Support to Task Force Eagle | IX. Counterintelligence and HUMINT | X. Information Operations in Bosnia: A Soldier's Perspective | XI. C4ISR Systems and Services | XII. NDU/CCRP Bosnia Study | XIII. Lessons Learned About Lessons Learned | XIV. Summary | End Notes | Appendix A: The Dayton Peace Agreement Summary | Appendix B: Chronology of IFOR Events | Appendix C: References | Appendix D: Acronyms | About the Contributing Editor | About the Authors