An article in Newsday demonstrates the power of sitting down and trying to understand the people who make up a country you've invaded. But there's also another lesson there, so far unremarked in prior commentary. The technology that Lt. Col. King is using to keep track of tribes could be done so much better and his work could be so much more effective if he were properly supported by a more extensive technology effort.
LTC King is using a palm pilot to keep track of what he finds out about the various tribes. But does that database get regularly injected upstream to the center and filtered back down to all the rest of the officers who could both use that information and could contribute to it? From the story it seems not.
An extensive wireless occupation net would permit this sort of information interchange and more. But while generic Palm software could do a reasonable job, there's no reason why specialized software couldn't be created that would do the job much better. Palm software tends to have fairly fast development times too so we're not talking about something that would necessarily have to wait for the next go around either.
The Pentagon has a lot of whiz bang technology that can trickle down to the civilian sector (the Internet itself being a prime example). Iraq is a practical example of how the technology flow can go the other direction. We civilians have some ability to see that tech flow towards the military broadened and strengthened.
Posted by TMLutas at December 22, 2003 06:41 PM