If the Iraqi military operated in paranoid fashion, with information disseminated on a need-to-know basis (and only Saddam needed to know everything), the American force brought in to destroy it had chosen to use information as its lifeblood—achieving along the way a quantum leap in teamwork and military effectiveness. Much of modern military history consists of the endless quest for a more effective combination of arms—of organizing infantry, armor, artillery and airpower to produce the elusive synergy that is more than the sum of its parts. Problem was, every new capability seemed to square the difficulties of command and control rather than producing the desired synergy.

For the American military, this problem was compounded by the first waves of the information age. Although computers and information technology offered an array of innovative capabilities, each new system was conceived, developed and procured by the same military services—and in many of the same ways—that acquired ships, tanks and airplanes. The result was a problem that most CIOs will recognize. Far from being built in, interoperability was an afterthought, or even an additional expense to be jettisoned whenever funding cuts loomed. Thus, a paradox: Even as computers grew more sophisticated and information synergy more possible, the military services grew further apart. And yet, every time U.S. forces took the field, there was invariably a price to pay for the continuing "seam" of interoperability, such as the notorious "friendly fire" incident in April 1994, when two Air Force F-15 fighters mistakenly shot down two Army Blackhawk helicopters over northern Iraq, killing 26 people.

As most CIOs will also understand, progress in correcting this anomaly was uneven. But in the 1990s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the combatant commanders began to promote a vision of future warfare in which C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) systems would be forged into a new style of American warfare in which interoperability was the key to information dominance—and information dominance the key to victory.

It is difficult to see Operation Iraqi Freedom as anything less than a vindication of that ambitious vision. While some analysts—including this one—had worried that a wired battlefield inevitably meant more insidious micromanagement, Gen. Tommy Franks achieved something unique. Like his predecessors, he used information to gain a "God’s-eye view" of the battlefield, but he also insisted that what he knew and could see be shared with his subordinate commanders. Franks then insisted that they use this information to seize and keep the tactical initiative. Far from being a tool of micromanagement, information dominance was used to take risks but not gambles.