Non-Verbal Communication in Military Leadership Is Active,

Non-Verbal Communication in Military

Military leadership is active, purposeful and authoritative, and captures the lessons of experience and uses the wisdom and methods of history's great captains to show the way for current and future leaders (Jantzen pp). However, writing doctrine and understanding the human dimension of leadership in the twenty-first century will be more complex than ever due to the advancements in technology (Jantzen pp). Information technology is unique from other technologies because of its role in radically reinventing organizational structures, doctrine and procedures, yet it is also very flexible and can be altered to fit the culture and unique needs of the organization (Jantzen pp).

The information age has been called the information revolution, and a closely related concept is revolution in military affairs (Jantzen pp).

The term "revolution" connotes what George Gilder calls a paradigm shift, or the "collapse of formerly pivotal scarcities" coupled with "the rise of new forms of abundance" (Jantzen pp). Within the competitive environment of economic and military power, technology is the abundant resource, while time and attention are scarce, thus to react faster than the competition, leaders make decisions in progress (Jantzen pp). This often requires finding entirely new ways of doing things, not merely more efficient ways of doing things the same way, in other words, the demands of information-age technology may require leaders to be technological experts who must master the organizational leaders' social and political skills (Jantzen pp).

Most leaders are aware of the potential pitfalls of digitization, including its inability to overcome the fog and friction of war, and promotes:

Overreliance on electronic sensors, communications and information processing.

Vulnerability to electronic and asymmetric attack.

More centralized control.

Information overload and other pathologies.

(Jantzen pp).

Technology allows increased control of large bureaucracies or empowers large networks, and can be a powerful servant to an industrial or information-focused strategy or a powerful example of a knowledge-focused strategy (Jantzen pp).

Modern information technology permits many leadership approaches, and enables parallel and collaborative planning and decision making with the use of video teleconferencing and other collaborative tools that allow shorter planning time, easier dissemination of orders and rapid adjustment to conditions (Jantzen pp). Electronic communications increase commanders' span of control, however, the inspiring and motivating effect of physical presence is diminished (Jantzen pp). Decentralized control by disconnected decision makers is different from decentralized control by connected decision makers (Jantzen pp). To be an effective communicator in each medium, voice, video, graphic image or text, a leader must have certain skills (Jantzen pp). Since approximately 90% of human communication is nonverbal, developing this skill requires time and training (Jantzen pp). Using video teleconferencing may solve some of the nonverbal communication issues, however it also requires diverting bandwidth resources from other uses (Jantzen pp). Data radios require preparing data for transmission over limited bandwidth, properly programming and operating the radio in the data network, and receiving and interpreting the data, therefore, it may be more efficient to communicate with symbols and images than with voice and text (Jantzen pp).

The operating system and application program object codes of the software are written for a particular hardware, and generally, there is no standardization in writing these object codes, so as the hardware is changed, the operating systems also undergo changes (Pathak pp). Suitable operating system for military use should address the radar displays, map digitization displays, weapon and system controller and sensor-input devices, thus for military systems standardized software needs to be developed which can be ported in any hardware (Pathak pp).

Communications are the backbone of any combat force so much so that many a time the command and control functions are considered synonym to communication, though these are distinct activities (Pathak pp). Communications provide the means and channels for a number of managerial and command and control activities in general (Pathak pp). "The convergence of communication with computation or processing, network technologies, multimedia has brought in an integrated and interactive systems approach so far as the military information systems are concerned" (Pathak pp).

Some important and common features of military communications around the world over are:

1. Adoption of systems approach as against individual linkages or even networks.

2. Fusion of communication and computation into networks. The differentiation between computers and communications has been blurred. Communication has become synonymous to network.

3. Modem militaries are giving higher priorities to data transmission as against voice.

4. Growing use of sensor, imageries have placed phenomenal demands on the speeds and capacity of the channel. Hence, the trends towards higher ends of frequency spectrum, from UHF tb SHF, EHF and even milHmeires waves and lasers.