Team of Teams

The great lesson that the US military has learned from the war in Iraq started with big data and social media and ended with crashing the entire organisation and management of the world's civil and economic structures. During the mission in Iraq, which lasted from 2004 to 2009, it was in fact very clear from the beginning that the traditional military methods were not sufficient to secure victory in a modern battlefield. Extreme discipline and efficiency and the perfect hierarchical machine that have been the cornerstones and the pride of the US military for decades, clash with today’s very different dynamics created by the emergence of new media and communication channels: instead of enhancing military efficiency, social media video streaming, cross-border messaging, real-time monitoring, the sheer volatility and immediacy with which the information spread destabilized its very foundations and rules, initially turning them from complicated into over-complex, and finally causing them to collapse into chaos. The very same power that makes these new digital tools revolutionary, also undermines the foundations of society as we know it, making it impossible to predict every possible scenario, and therefore an approach based on compliance with perfect procedures and rules becomes ineffective.