Fighting the plasma war with the Singapore Armed Forces Battlefield Management System (BMS)

In peace and war, there is such a thing as Too Much Information.

Being able to see first, see more, decide and act faster is a double edged sword: Warfighters with such prescience may be embolded to stay and fight - or they may flee in the face of superior numbers.

This is the dilemma posed to the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) as it taps on military technology to give its warfighters a better sense of the battle situation than ever before.

The Battlefield Management System (BMS) showcased during Exercise Wallaby this past week is arguably a step forward in exploiting computers, assorted military sensors and the wonders of modern info-comms technology to produce a best effort, realtime picture of the battlespace.

Indeed, SAF warfighters gain a clearer appreciation of situation not by poking their head outside their armoured vehicles but by viewing the flat plasma screen of the BMS and toying around with its features.

In an instant, friend and foe shows up in vivid colour on the bird's eye view of the map grid. Text messages and pictures can be sent from one BMS-equipped platform to another as fast as one's fingers can type.

With SAF war machines exchanging information with one another as the battle unfolds, new hostile elements can be added when they are encountered. This keeps the air and ground situation picture refreshed.

BMS is the visual representation of knowing yourself and knowing your enemy. This display of Precision Information would have knocked Sun Tzu off his chair.

Dangers of tech infatuation
But hardware alone does not guarantee victory and the reliance on technology - left unchecked - could morph into an infatuation with technology, putting in a gizmo for the sake of doing so.

Having data sent wirelessly exposes the SAF to attempts to disrupt, degrade, destroy or exploit such free to air information. Boffins who work for the Singaporean Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) and SAF are betting on the improbability that algorithms that encrypt the data can be broken.

During the Second World War, the Germans made the same bet - and lost. The secret behind the breaking of the Enigma codes is so closely guarded that the full story has yet to be unclassified decades after many German U-boats were sunk.

If a clever Enemy can read our mail, this would be an advantage that an astute Enemy would keep quiet about. The Allies certainly behaved this way. They exploited Enigma judiciously, sometimes to the extent of allowing convoys to fall into ambushes set by German submarines as a sudden course diversion with no Allied surveillance assets in sight may have aroused German suspicions that their codes had been compromised.

Even without the threat of code breakers, Too Much Information could bedevil Singapore's citizen soldiers.

Corporate warriors would be familiar with bosses who demand near instantaneous responses to emails, day or night, work day or weekend. With BMS, the SAF could breed a keyboard warrior mindset where soldiers are fixated more with trading information on the BMS, than in using BMS to fight the battle.

Breaking point
Too Much Information could also unnerve the troops when the tide turns against them. The BMS is a boon to morale when things are going your way and the red Enemy icons are erased one by one, indicating you are winning. But if the reverse happened, this bird's eye view might test the fight or flight instincts that are in every soldier. And let us be frank, that flight instinct will kick in for some commanders. Should that happen, the realtime tracking would show this in an instant, thus challenging the rest of the team to make a call whether or not to stay or abandon the position.

In all gunfights, there is a breaking point - that test of will to fight - at which the skirmish line loses its critical mass. That breaking point is the moment at which astute commanders viewing the situation can sense that the tide has turned (for or against their favour, depending on which side you're on). A rupture of defence lines can be turned into a rout by concentrating combat power at that weak spot.

This is why commanders like to lead from the front - not because they are bullet-proof but because it gave them a firsthand view of the state of play and critical junctures at which immediate and violent action against the opposing force should be initiated with remorse or delay.

Another worry with BMS is the possibility that the system could fall into Enemy hands intact. Should this happen, the Enemy would be presented with an information bonanza. To guard against this, SAF war machines that carry BMS are said to have a master key that wipes out all data in an instant. But to assume that a soldier can assess the situation so astutely and time his/her action of wiping out the data so precisely is asking too much of our citizen's army.

Pulp fiction and real shooting wars are peppered with situations where incredibly close calls ended up with the hero living to fight another day. Are we to expect BMS custodians to sit in their vehicle wondering if they should trigger a system shutdown the moment the first enemy rounds start plinking their armour? And when is that kamikaze moment? When the enemy is at the top hatch of your vehicle?

Modern warfare is filled with examples of the Enemy capturing military hardware largely intact. It is dangerous, indeed foolhardy, to assume the SAF is innoculated against this malady. Vehicles could fall out of one's hands by accident, design or inept command decisions. If popular brands of smart phones can be cloned, what makes you think the SAF's BMS cannot be reverse engineered?

Another point worth considering is the way Gen Y citizen soldiers fit into the tech-centric SAF. Much ado has been made about their higher education levels - 60% of full-time National Servicemen having attained a polytechnic diploma or better. Their ability to work with high tech gizmos like BMS makes a cheerful story for MINDEF/SAF. Their mastery of keystrokes, their rapid-fire SMSes conjure visual images of tech-savvy NSFs tailored just right for the tech-centric Third Generation (3G) SAF. It's almost like the wired generation of Gen Ys and 3G SAF were made for one another, with such a serendipitous pairing resulting in increased combat power.

Indeed, the increasing reliance on plasma by the 3G SAF has evoked comparisons between the colourful moving icons marching across SAF plasma screens with those fought on computer games.

Such comparisons are unfortunate. They do nothing to harden mindsets to the reality that fighting real operations is not a computer game.

In war, Game Over is for real.