Is military IT power waning?

Military IT was once a seedbed for innovation, but today it appears business IT is calling the shots

The anti-war movement has tended to omit arms firms from its gallery of rogues: it has been Texaco and other oil majors, and Dick Cheney’s oil-to-construction empire Halliburton that have been criticised for gaining a pecuniary interest in Gulf War 2. Yet the same “Not in my name” crowd misses the changing role of the military-industrial complex (MIC), not in prompting US belligerence – that was always very arguable – but in shaping the future of IT. In very broad terms, the MIC is an iron triangle of the armed services, arms firms and government.

Traditionally, the Pentagon would specify weapons systems of infinite cost and complexity, and apologetic economists would welcome the technological “spin-off” from such systems for the civilian sector. The phenomenon went a lot further than the popular ode to Nasa and the Teflon frying-pan.

After Sputnik in 1957, for example, the need for missile-borne IT systems to be light had a lot to do with the development of the integrated circuit.

In recent decades, however, the wastefulness of the MIC has become so great that analysts have tended to highlight “spin-on” rather than spin-off as the chief trend in military technology. The network-centric warfare that has dominated desert actions is based on the familiar, peaceful technologies of laptops, the Global Positioning System and – a thing I found especially scary about the war in Iraq – giant, glitzy, consumerish flat-screen displays.

Of course, since 11 September 2001 there has been an enormous effort by the Department of Defense, US universities and private inventors to come up with new defences against Al Qaeda. But something has changed.

In the new military zone of “asymmetric warfare”, every Pentagon IT system is felt vulnerable to hackers of a fanatical bent – at any time. In this scenario, military applications of IT may be no defence at all, right now, against lone codebreakers.

To my mind, however, all this goes to show that risk aversion now dominates military life as much as the civilian sort. In a world where Microsoft can only bring itself to pay a bounty of $250,000 for information about the originators of viruses, I can’t quite believe that a few keystrokes from a jihadi in an Afghan cave can bring down America’s satellite telecommunications.

Enthusiasts and critics of military IT overestimate, respectively, its vulnerability and its power. Of course, the software behind Bush’s Version 2.0 of Reagan’s old Strategic Defence Initiative cannot be relied on to provide an impermeable shield against missiles. But IT is nevertheless an important factor in US military superiority.

Fears of asymmetric hackers in fact reveal continuing frustrations about the MIC’s imperviousness to reform. As with our very own NHS, the feeling is that throwing money at government-related IT often achieves little bang for the buck.

Military IT is always worth scrutiny. But its dynamics are not all that special. As for the debate about spin-on and spin-off, that represents a Geoff Hoon-style abdication of responsibility. It is always someone else, it appears, who has the job of developing innovations.