Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, Obama’s choice to head Joint Chiefs, is a low-tech soldier

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The Army had spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the previous decade on an annual war game designed to peer 15 to 20 years into the future and envision what kinds of technology and fighting concepts the military would need to prevail in the next major war. The game involved dozens of role players and an army of defense contractors waging computer-simulated battles.

Dempsey, whom President Obama will nominate on Monday to be chairman of the Joint chiefs of Staff, killed the war game in 2009. He replaced it the next year with a series of seminars devoted to producing more flexible and free-thinking officers at all levels.

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Dempsey has spent much of the last decade leading troops in a messy, low-tech war in Iraq and is deeply skeptical of technology’s ability to alter the basic nature of combat.

“We operate where our enemies, indigenous populations, culture, politics, and religion intersect and where the fog and friction of war persists,” he wrote recently in the introduction to the Army’s main operating concept.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/gen-martin-e-dempsey-obamas-choice-to-head-joint-chiefs-is-a-low-tech-soldier/2011/05/29/AGPaKPEH_story.html