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Coming Out of the Closedt World,
by John Horberg
Traditional Military Procedure
Edwards makes the point that computerized, rule-based methods of operation are completely contrary to the
traditional way military orders have been given and carried out throughout the history of modern armed
forces:
[T]raditional military hierarchies are anything but mechanical. At every level, individuals bear
responsibilities rather than perform functions. A field officer may be ordered to 'take that hill,' but the
whole point of such an order is that how he carries it out is up to him. We may call this system the
'command tradition.' In the 1950s, within the space of a very few years, the Air Force command
traditionalists who had opposed the computerized air defense system either became, or were replaced by, the
most vigorous proponents of centralized, computerized warfare anywhere in the American armed services.
Edwards notes that, in contrast to the command tradition, "Nuclear forces... flatten their hierarchies as much
as possible and retain authority at the upper levels. They do this because they require instantaneous and
massive responses, which must be preprogrammed because their execution must be virtually automatic, and
because the consequences of the release of nuclear weapons are too great to be devolved upon lower-level
commanders."
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