“On April 2, 2003, army lieutenant colonel Ernest ‘Rock’ Marcone led an armored battalion with about 1,000 U.S. troops to seize ‘Objective Peach’, a bridge across the Euphrates River, the last natural barrier before Baghdad. That night, the battalion was surprised by the largest counterattack of the war. Sensing and communications technologies failed to warn of the attack’s vast scale—between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi troops and about 100 tanks or other vehicles. The U.S. success in the battle was the result of superior tactics and equipment.”
From a totally intriguing new piece by David Talbot, “How Technology Failed in Iraq,” in MIT’s Technology Review.