Remember those “Army of One” ads? They seem so unrelated to the unified mass required of a military force, that the campaign appeared manufactured to attract unsuspecting recruits drawn to the idea of rugged individualism intrinsic in being an individual in the military. “Army of one” is rife with the images of superhuman heroes with the strength to equal an entire branch of the United States Military, unquestionably the strongest military at the time of the campaign.
It's easy to shrug off the army of one campaign as a shameless pandering to juvenile dreams of heroism, however, it can also be thought of as a sign of the military’s movement toward a distributed network, or perhaps drawing upon the strengths of the distributed network without completely transferring to it.
The structure, then, retains aspects of the centralized network: the President provides the central node--at least symbolically--from which the rest of the network fans out. This mirrors the President’s status as the leader of the nation. Obviously the president is a busy man, however, and presidents are rarely educated in the military schools that provide the true framework of the armed forces. This is where the distributed network begins to mix with the centralized network materialize as the network that the military truly operates on. Chain of command moves in one direction, from the bottom up, meaning that there are different levels of nodes, still in a hierarchy, each of which must go through their separate chains of command without skipping links. It isn’t exactly a distributed network, where any hub can be plugged into be lesser nodes, but it isn’t a pure, centralized network either.
The Army of One campaign presents a new perspective on the army--one that is presently impossible because it requires a levelling of the ranking system. Still, it does draw off the newly emerging distributed network, believed to be unranked, equal connections between any agent in the system--with no limitations upon connections between agents. Each army of one represents an agent here. A pilot is no good without an engineer for his plane, but he also cannot function without mechanics. In this equation none of these jobs is better than the other, except through how they may be paid or socially perceived. Practically speaking, none of them have much purpose in a vacuum.
It's easy to shrug off the army of one campaign as a shameless pandering to juvenile dreams of heroism, however, it can also be thought of as a sign of the military’s movement toward a distributed network, or perhaps drawing upon the strengths of the distributed network without completely transferring to it.
The structure, then, retains aspects of the centralized network: the President provides the central node--at least symbolically--from which the rest of the network fans out. This mirrors the President’s status as the leader of the nation. Obviously the president is a busy man, however, and presidents are rarely educated in the military schools that provide the true framework of the armed forces. This is where the distributed network begins to mix with the centralized network materialize as the network that the military truly operates on. Chain of command moves in one direction, from the bottom up, meaning that there are different levels of nodes, still in a hierarchy, each of which must go through their separate chains of command without skipping links. It isn’t exactly a distributed network, where any hub can be plugged into be lesser nodes, but it isn’t a pure, centralized network either.
The Army of One campaign presents a new perspective on the army--one that is presently impossible because it requires a levelling of the ranking system. Still, it does draw off the newly emerging distributed network, believed to be unranked, equal connections between any agent in the system--with no limitations upon connections between agents. Each army of one represents an agent here. A pilot is no good without an engineer for his plane, but he also cannot function without mechanics. In this equation none of these jobs is better than the other, except through how they may be paid or socially perceived. Practically speaking, none of them have much purpose in a vacuum.
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