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"If We Run Out of Batteries, This War is Screwed." By Joshua Davis It's early April, days before the fall of Baghdad, and a convoy of trucks from the 11th Signal Brigade is rolling through southern Iraq. The mission: establish a digital beachhead in central Iraq. Without this advance node and a handful like it, the Army's Third Infantry Division cannot receive the precise targeting information it needs to fight its way into the capital. About 9 am, soldiers in the convoy see something that fills them with dread: four dead sheep by the side of the dusty road. Within a mile, they spot two more and quickly pull the convoy to a halt. What many had feared since arriving in the Middle East now looks to be a reality: chemical attack. The convoy leader does two things, one in keeping with well-established military protocol and one entirely new. First, he makes a lot of noise. He lets out three long blasts on the horn - the low tech signal for a chemical attack. Then, after donning his own protective gear, he turns to a computer terminal bolted to the dash of his vehicle. Suspect chemical attack, he types into a Microsoft Chat session running on the tactical Internet, the military's battlefield communications system. Multiple dead sheep by side of road. Pls advise. Two hundred miles away - in a warehouse at Forward Command - Lieutenant Colonel Norman Mims, the intelligence officer for the 11th, sees this curious message appear in the chat room and replies, How many sheep over how much distance? 6 sheep. Approx. 1 mile. A veteran of Desert Storm, Mims has learned that sheep in the region regularly die and are simply dragged to the side of the road. The number and distance are typical. Unless air quality is degraded, chemical attack unlikely. If this had been Gulf War I, the convoy would have lost a full day - calling in the incident by radio, describing it to three or four rungs up the command ladder, and waiting for a crew of specialists to arrive, test the air, and give the all-clear. But this war is different. An email gives the sheep's coordinates to a chemical investigation team, and the convoy just keeps moving. The history of warfare is marked by periodic leaps in technology - the triumph of the longbow at Crécy, in 1346; the first decisive use of air power, in World War I; the terrifying destructiveness of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, in 1945. And now this: a dazzling array of technology that signals the arrival of digital warfare. What we saw in Gulf War II was a new age of fighting that combined precision weapons, unprecedented surveillance of the enemy, agile ground forces, and - above all - a real-time communications network that kept the far-flung operation connected minute by minute. Welcome to the so-called revolution in military affairs, the new theory of war that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been promoting since he arrived at the Pentagon in 2001. Generals at Central Command, in Qatar, put the concept into practice as they sent troops racing toward Baghdad, hopscotching across Iraq, and sidestepping enemy assaults. If rear units were attacked, if supply lines were threatened - so the theory went - the technology would allow soldiers to spot the problem quickly enough to dispatch defenders, who would swarm to the rescue. Information would take the place of a massive troop presence on the ground. Dead sheep could be safely ignored. In short, the war was a grand test of the netcentric strategy in development since the first Gulf War. At least, that's the triumphal view from the Pentagon briefing room. But what was it like on the ground? As Wired's war correspondent, I tracked the network from the generals' plasma screens at Central Command to the forward nodes on the battlefields in Iraq. What I discovered was something entirely different from the shiny picture of techno-supremacy touted by the proponents of the Rumsfeld doctrine. I found an unsung corps of geeks improvising as they went, cobbling together a remarkable system from a hodgepodge of military-built networking technology, off-the- shelf gear, miles of Ethernet cable, and commercial software. And during two weeks in the war zone, I never heard anyone mention the revolution in military affairs. Within days of the first air strikes, I arrive at US Central Command, just outside the capital city of Doha. Centcom is the headquarters for General Tommy Franks and his JOC - the Joint Operations Center, where the air, land, and naval campaigns are controlled. At today's press briefing, commanders defended their war plan, which appears to be bogged down at the moment. Critics back home and even some commanders in the field are complaining that the ground forces moved too quickly, that they're outrunning the supply lines, and that there aren't enough boots on the ground. Franks' reply: We're sticking with the plan. I'm here to find out why he's so confident. After being subjected to two pat-downs, multiple x-rays, and the inquisitive snout of a bomb-sniffing dog, I'm escorted across the camp, a featureless grid of tan warehouses. We stop in front of one of the buildings, which is guarded by three MPs armed with machine guns and grenade launchers. A sign posted on a folding picnic table outside the door reads, "the beatings will stop when morale rises." Inside, truck-sized steel shipping containers dot the perimeter of the sprawling warehouse. In the middle, a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire surrounds a series of khaki tents. Two more flak-jacketed MPs guard the gate to this inner sanctum - the JOC itself. A ruddy Texan sticks his hand out at me: "Lieutenant Colonel Caddell. Glad to meet you." Tymothy Caddell is in charge of wiring the JOC. He manages the 65 servers and 50 Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force network administrators who keep the control center's generals connected to the war. "In October, this was an empty warehouse," he says. "It takes most big companies years to bring 65 servers online. We did it in three months." Caddell leads the way to one of the shipping containers. Inside, two soldiers baby-sit three rows of Sun servers. "This is where the Global Command and Control System lives," Caddell says. GCCS - known as "Geeks" to soldiers in the field - is the military's HAL 9000. It's an umbrella system that tracks every friendly tank, plane, ship, and soldier in the world in real time, plotting their positions as they move on a digital map. It can also show enemy locations gleaned from intelligence. "We're in a whole different ball game from the last Gulf war," Caddell says. "We had a secure network back in '91, but the bandwidth wasn't there and the applications weren't there. Now they are." The prime example, he says, is a portal called the Warfighting Web. Launched just nine months ago, it lets military personnel access key data - battle plans, intelligence reports, maps, online chats, radio transcripts, photos, and video. Caddell sketches out a typical scenario: A Special Forces unit in northern Iraq attacks an Iraqi irregular unit. The firefight is recorded with digital video, which is uploaded to GCCS via secure satellite. JOC intelligence officers fire up the Warfighting Web, click through to "Latest Intelligence," watch the fight, write a summary, and post follow-up orders to the unit. The soldiers either download the orders directly or receive them by radio from the nearest Tactical Operations Center, the most forward command post on the network. We leave the GCCS container and head past a row of large refrigerated metal boxes. Caddell steps up to one and leans on a 3-foot metal lever. The thick front wall swings open, revealing two rows of Compaq servers. A blast of cool air hits me; the temperature here is about 20 degrees lower than in the warehouse. "Welcome to Siprnet," he says. GCCS runs over Siprnet - the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network - in the same way that Web applications run over the public Internet. The difference with "Sipper" is that it's basically a far-flung local area network. To maximize security, it doesn't connect with the Internet proper. But it links Centcom to the battlefield and, among other things, allows Franks to talk to Rumsfeld and President Bush via two- way videoconference every evening. Caddell has one more important piece of Centcom to show me. "How would you like to see the JOC help desk?" he says, motioning me out of the container. We head toward the far end of the warehouse, where Specialist Adam Cluff - a heavyset, droopy-eyed kid from Utah - stands at attention when he sees Caddell. It looks like he'd been taking a nap. I ask him what he does here. "If a general has a problem with his Web browser, then I fix it," Cluff says. "How do you fix it?" I ask. "I consult Microsoft online help," he replies. "We have Premier help," he adds, referring to the live operators available to subscribers only. "But most of the time it's something as simple as telling them they have to plug in so the battery doesn't run out." And then, with complete seriousness, he adds, "Without me here, I don't think that we'd be where we are today." The US Forward Command is a half hour due east of Kuwait City, approximately 75 miles from the Iraqi border. I've flown here from Qatar to learn more about the 11th Signal Brigade, the soldiers tasked with wiring the battlefield. They tote M16s, but their job is to jump out of helicopters and set up packet-based wireless networks. Their unofficial motto: Connecting the foxhole to the White House. Without these guys, Lieutenant Colonel Caddell's Warfighting Web would have no war to fight. For the 11th, the epicenter of the campaign is here at Satellite Park, where a dozen dishes are spread across a patch of dirt enclosed by razor wire. The operation is monitored by four men and a woman, each with a laptop and a secure digital telephone. They are the controllers. Each oversees the health of one of the brigade's five networks. That means all of the Army's battlefield communications flow through these five people. Their laptops display icons representing a web of nodes and switches. When the icons are green, everything is running fine. But when a link turns red, panic sets in. "A link went red yesterday," says Sergeant Danny Booher, one of the controllers. "One of my guys came under mortar fire near Basra and the satellite got hit." Booher got on the phone with his nearest unit, and, minutes later, there was a humvee racing through the desert, towing a satellite dish on wheels. Lieutenant Colonel Mims - the officer who made sense of the dead sheep - chimes in. "If it's a question of the network going down, we get helicopters, air support, tanks - whatever we need," he says. As the brigade's intelligence chief, Mims is in charge of knowing where the enemy is and positioning forward signal units in secure locations. In the first Gulf war, Mims was a junior intel officer. "Signal has become a lot more complicated in the Internet age. We used to only have to worry about radios. Now it's about providing enough bandwidth to power streaming video and monitor real-time troop and vehicle movement." The improvement in communications is the real innovation in this war, he explains. He grabs my notebook and a blue ballpoint pen and draws an obtuse angle. "When we attacked in the last Gulf war, we basically had our vehicles lined in a wedge," he says. "We had five divisions moving across the desert like that. As they went through, they'd sweep an area clear - if there's a problem, the other unit can see and hear it, and, more important, the unit is close by and can arrive quickly to help. In that model, once you move through, the rear zones are secure. There's not much left back there." Now Mims draws a bunch of small circles spread out on the page. This is Rumsfeld's theory of swarm tactics. Because technology allows soldiers to keep track of each other, even when they're out of one another's sight, they can now move in any formation. "We may not always know exactly where the enemy is," Mims explains, "but we know where we are. When the enemy engages us in this spread-out fashion, we send air cover to protect the unit until the support forces arrive." Swarm theory holds that you move fast and don't worry about securing the rear. The benefits to this are many. First, you need fewer troops and less equipment. War becomes cheaper. Second, it's harder for the enemy to attack a widely dispersed formation. Third, units can cover much more ground - they aren't forced to maintain the wedge by slowing down to accommodate lagging vehicles. Fourth, swarming allows you to go straight for the heart of the enemy's command structure, undermining its support from the inside out rather than battling on the periphery. Swarm theory is also moving online - into chat rooms, an application Mims is pioneering for military purposes. When a problem develops on the battlefield, a soldier radios a Tactical Operations Center. The TOC intelligence guy types the problem into a chat session - Mims and his colleagues use Microsoft Chat - and the problem is "swarmed" by experts from the Pentagon to Centcom. Not only is the technology changing the way we maneuver, Mims notes, it's changing the way we think. But the system is not without problems. Because anyone on Siprnet who wanted to could set up a chat, 50 rooms sprang up in the months before the war. The result: information overload. "We've started throwing people out of the rooms who don't belong there," Mims says. "What's funny about using Microsoft Chat," he adds with a sly smile, "is that everybody has to choosean icon to represent themselves. Some of these guys haven't bothered, so the program assigns them one. We'll be in the middle of a battle and a bunch of field artillery colonels will come online in the form of these big-breasted blondes. We've got a few space aliens, too." The next morning, I'm headed north toward the Iraqi border in the backseat of a Mitsubishi Pajero, the radio blasting Al Green's "Love and Happiness." Forward Command is chronically short of humvees and has rented a small fleet of soccer-mom SUVs in Kuwait to fill in. The flak-jacketed soldiers look ridiculous crammed inside. Their task is to deliver a satellite dish to the next node in the communications web: a desert relay station that receives battlefield transmissions from Iraq and beams them via satellite back to command centers in Kuwait, Qatar, and Washington. The Pajero speeds 60 miles north through the desert to a 10-foot dirt berm topped by razor wire. On the other side is Camp Udairi, 15 miles from the Iraqi border. In addition to being a staging ground for troops and tanks, the northernmost edge of the camp is cordoned off for the 11th. Dozens of antennas and satellite dishes are assembled. Cables from each of these snake into a single green tent in the middle of the array. Four soldiers guard a checkpoint leading to the tent, which is stiflingly hot inside - somewhere around 100 degrees, though it's only 85 outside. Corporal Joshua Murray, the 28-year-old in charge, is clearly worried. His 8-foot bank of Cisco switches and routers is hot to the touch and covered in a thick layer of sediment. "The air-conditioning is breaking down," he tells me. "And the dust is impossible." As we talk, Private First Class Michael Boone sweeps the switches with a canister vacuum much like the one I use to clean my linoleum back home. "This equipment was never meant to be run in this kind of environment," Murray says. "When a dust storm comes through here, the tent is totally useless. I wouldn't be able to see you, that's how bad it is." I'm standing two feet from him. "We'll have people vacuuming the switches and servers around the clock, which helps," he says. "But none of it's going to matter if it gets hot." "You're in the desert," I say. "It's going to get hot." He turns away and nervously scratches his head. These servers were built for climate-controlled rooms in Silicon Valley. The military is already pushing them to their limit, running a network that fast becomes unstable whenever the temperature pushes past 100 degrees. By next month, daytime highs will hit 125. If the war were to drag on, the system could crash. The further down the line I go, the easier it is to see the holes in the system. "Who the fuck do we look like, Lewis and Clark?" Private Jared Johnson blurts out when I ask him how we ended up lost in the Iraqi desert. I'm headed north again, this time with a 97-vehicle convoy whose mission is to deliver missile launchers and set up a Tactical Operations Center just south of the Baghdad suburbs. But there's a problem; the convoy makes two massive U-turns in search of a side road that leads to a much-needed fuel stop. "We're lima lima mike foxtrot in Iraq," says Sergeant Frank Cleveland, who's riding shotgun in the truck where I've hitched a ride. "What does that mean?" I ask from the backseat. "We're lost like a motherfucker," he says. Theoretically, the commander of the convoy should know its position. This guy hasn't been able to figure it out. But even without human error the system can break down. One soldier I talked to said the screen icons representing the convoy and all other forces disappeared when we crossed the border. All that was left was a map of Iraq. There are other problems. "When we were deployed from the States," says Lieutenant Marc Lewis - the commander of the convoy's 27 heavy equipment trucks - "they told us that we would be given encrypted, military-issue radios when we got here. When we arrived, they told us we should have brought our own." What Lewis brought was four Motorola Talkabouts, each with a range of about 1,000 feet. In the half-dozen convoy trips he's made since arriving in country, Lewis has taken to distributing a Talkabout to the first and last trucks. The other two go to vehicles at strategic points in between. It's hardly secure. Anybody with a radio could monitor the conversations. Lewis is improvising as best he can. Before leaving the States, he bought a handheld eTrex GPS device, which he uses to track each of his forays into Iraq. In essence, he's created a map of Iraq's charted and uncharted freeways and desert roads. He just has no way to share it with anybody. But he is able to navigate as well as any of the tank or missile commanders he transported. I notice that at least four other soldiers in the convoy have brought their own store-bought GPS handhelds. These devices keep the convoys on track in lieu of having proper systems. "If we run out of batteries," Lewis says when showing me his map of Iraq, "this war is screwed." We have plenty of batteries. But at the moment, that doesn't matter. Though Lewis is in charge of the heavy-equipment transports, the lieutenant colonel leading the missile launchers to the front lines is the ranking officer in the convoy and therefore has final say over all aspects of its movements. Lewis has already led six trips into the desert, but the lieutenant colonel - who has never set foot in Iraq - runs the show. Even with his access to GCCS and a fully functioning encrypted radio, he's missed the turnoff twice. Lima lima mike foxtrot. The sound of gunfire is still reverberating in my head. Later that day - after we'd finally spotted the side road and were rolling again - Iraqi irregulars, camouflaged on a hill near the road, let loose with small-arms fire. I immediately dove for the floor of the cab and positioned my butt in the direction of the gunshots. If I was going to get hit, I reasoned, better my ass than my head. I'm starting to identify with the troops in the field. Rumsfeld's new theory of warfare leaves the common soldier feeling exposed. Swarm tactics make a lot of sense, but the flip side is that each individual is more isolated on the battlefield or in the supply lines. In previous conflicts, you kept your comrades in sight. Now soldiers have to take their comfort from a blip on a GCCS map - if they have one. About a quarter of the trucks in this convoy have GCCS, but the one I was riding in didn't. And even if Centcom or Forward Command were alerted, it still would have been demoralizing, because the message is, "You're on your own until help arrives." In essence, the security of one small group of soldiers is sacrificed for the good of the whole. The isolated unit draws enemy fire, exposing the location of the force without risking an entire company. The individual soldier has to trust that the technology will come through. The heavy equipment trucks unload the missile launchers on a desert plateau 60 miles from Baghdad. Sergeant Cleveland promises that the convoy won't return to Kuwait without me, so I catch a ride on a humvee headed for the battalion's Tactical Operations Center, a bouncy 10- minute trip across scrub brush and sand. Thirty soldiers stand in a 400-foot circle, creating an armed perimeter around the battalion's communications guys, who stand near the center feverishly setting up the TOC's network. "Once the battle begins," says Lieutenant Nick White, the soldier in charge of wiring the setup, "we can relax a little. The launchers can't begin until we've done our job, so for the comm guys, what's happening right now is our battle." The fight at this moment involves the double-time setup of dozens of pieces of networking gear. In a few minutes, White is talking on a satellite phone connected to an antenna that looks vaguely like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. "We're coming online," White tells a systems operator at Forward Command. This is the edge of the network. Missile launchers roll past me, deaf, dumb, and nearly blind until White gets the system running. But once he does, it's frighteningly lethal. Analysts at Forward Command and at the Pentagon review aerial and satellite surveillance. The analysts post potential target locations to an artillery chat room accessible in the field. Spotters assigned to infantry units on the ground confirm the location of the target via radio connection with the TOC. When the intel is validated, fire orders are transmitted to a launcher in the desert via White's wireless network. While White and his team continue setting up, I walk over to one of the vehicles that delivers missiles to the launchers. It's a two-man truck equipped with GCCS and piloted by Specialist Tom Fox. I ask him to show me how the system works, and he offers me a seat in the cab. A ruggedized computer is bolted onto the dash and displays a map of the surrounding area. I can see each of the missile launchers and ammunition supply trucks moving around the desert, including the one I'm sitting in. Someone asks Fox a question, and I realize this is my chance to try out the software. I right-click and am given the option of zooming in and out. One zoom out and I'm looking at the entire Baghdad region. Another zoom out and I see all of Iraq, with forces dotted in the north and heavily clumped around the capital in the center. One more click and I'm looking at the entire sphere of Central Command, from the edge of Libya to Pakistan. I see forces in Turkey, and clustered in Iraq and Kuwait. I feel like a four-star general. I'm sitting in the Iraqi desert looking at troop movements across 25 countries. "It's pretty neat," says Fox. In the intensity of my discovery, I didn't notice him watching me. For a second, I worry that he'll slam the system shut. Instead, he shows me the chat application. He points to a horizontal window running across the top of the screen above the map. A few messages are visible, one highlighted in red. "This one's new," he says, double-clicking on it. Guess who? it reads. Is this Sergeant Lopez? Fox types in. No, comes the reply. Is it Sergeant Walker? No. "What do you normally use the system for?" I ask, wondering about the use of my tax dollars. "Not much yet," he shrugs. "We just got it installed last week." Fox explains that the battalion used chat on the drive up to verify positions. It was their first field test. Theoretically, it would also be possible to contact anybody in the GCCS system, from General Franks to the vehicle 10 feet away. But you have to know screen names. Fox doesn't know any screen names outside his battalion. Nor does he have a radio. "If GCCS goes down, I'm screwed," he says. "Why didn't they give you a radio?" "Because they gave me GCCS." I ask Fox why they gave him a computer that allowed him to look at what was happening in Uzbekistan. He didn't know, nor did he care. He said he didn't look at anything other than the positions of the vehicles in his battalion. What happens if the enemy manages to capture his vehicle? "That won't happen," he says. "I'm not going to get caught." In fact, the standard procedure in case of capture is to turn off the engine, which shuts down the password-protected system. Soldiers are also taught to destroy their vehicle, if necessary, with an incinerator grenade, to make sure it will be no use to the enemy. I walk back to check in with White, glancing at the horizon to make sure my convoy is still there. It is. When I find him, I ask what happens if the network goes down, whether from heat, dust, or enemy attack. "We have all been trained in the basics," he says. "Everybody here knows how to do things the old-fashioned way. We're soldiers first. If GPS goes down, we've all been taught how to navigate using a compass and paper map. The Army has a backup for everything." We talk for a minute about the movement into Baghdad, and then I ask the whole comm group to point in the direction of the Iraqi capital. Three of them point in different directions. No matter. In the war to change the way war is fought, the techies seem to have won the first battle. Despite the heat and the glitches and the holes in the communications network, Rumsfeld's great experiment is being hailed a success. The revolutionaries now have plenty of ammunition for their drive to change the military. But the success papers over the uncertainties that remain. The next enemy - North Korea? Syria? Iran? - may be better prepared and better equipped, and will certainly have learned from Saddam Hussein's experience. Perhaps more likely, the next enemy won't be a nation-state at all but an adaptable terrorist organization much less vulnerable to swarming tanks and missiles. White and his men have almost finished setting up their operations center, and I realize I've been here longer than I planned. I look up in time to notice the last of the heavy trucks disappearing over the horizon. My ride back to Kuwait is leaving without me. For a second, I am unable to breathe, and then my heart starts racing. I quickly shake White's hand, run to the nearest humvee, and beg the guy sitting in the driver's seat to chase after the convoy. He tells me I'll have to ask his superior. I race to find the superior, plead my case, and am told to talk to someone else. I don't want to end up stuck with a bunch of navigationally challenged missile jockeys in a war zone. I beg a third soldier. "Jump in," he says. We tear off across the desert and reach the paved road. Within 15 minutes, we catch up with the last truck, but the road is too narrow to come alongside and the humvee doesn't have a horn. So I lean out the side and start flailing my arms frantically. Nothing happens. They aren't looking in the rearview mirror. I'm choking on the dust and don't think I can last much longer. "Stop you goddamn motherfucking bastards!" I finally scream. It's good old-fashioned Army communication. It works. Somebody leans out the passenger side of the truck and it begins to slow down. In two minutes, I'm headed out of Iraq. How the War Was Wired Communications played a pivotal role in Gulf War II, the first full-scale deployment of the information age. Here's a look at the network behind the new tactics. by Joshua Davis The network in action: In the middle of a sandstorm, a surveillance aircraft 1 spots an Iraqi tank battalion moving outside Baghdad. An unmanned drone 2 assigned to cover the area picks up the thermal disturbance and posts an infrared image on the Warfighting Web, either by satellite or line- of-sight relay stations. Analysts at Central Command 3, the Pentagon 4, and Forward Command 5 evaluate the terrain and form a battle plan via chat session. Nearby helicopters 6 download email instructions to swarm the target, and a US tank battalion 7 receives attack orders by videoconference. 1. JSTARS The Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System is a Boeing 707 flying at 36,000 feet and outfitted with high-resolution radar that can spot moving vehicles 150 miles away. Data is beamed to Forward Command. 2. Predator An unmanned drone flying at 15,000 feet transmits real-time video and thermal images of targets identified by JSTARS. Line-of-Sight Relay Stations Data from Tactical Operations Centers in the field skips along an encrypted, packet-based wireless network carried by undirectional antennas. Border Relay Station Satellite dishes set up before the war receive battlefield communications and pass them to a Milstar satellite. Milstar Orbiting 25,605 miles overhead, the satellite receives data and distributes it to Forward Command, Central Command, and Washington. 3. Centcom Top brass in the Joint Operating Center communicate with US leadership and field commanders via video, voice, email, and chat. 4. Pentagon Experts working 24/7 troll network chat rooms and review satellite imagery, supplying analysis and advice. 5. Forward Command Networking specialists monitor every node in the battlefields and oversee rapid repair of damaged assets. 6. Apache Longbows Hovering helicopters are ready to fly to hot spots on orders sent from Forward Command via email or radio. Tactical Operations Center Dozens of quick-setup TOC's - command tents pitched between armored personnel carriers - upload reports, photos, and video. Positioned near battle zones, their omnidirectional antennas establish wireless coverage over a 50-mile radius. 7. M1-A1 Abrams Tanks Combat forces file battle reports to field commanders using SINCGARS - radios operating on the 30- to 80-MHz bands.