Lt. Gen. Brown says information overload creates issues for Army

Lt. Gen. Bob Brown was looking down at his new iWatch Tuesday during the first day of the Maneuver Warfighter Conference at Fort Benning.

It was a perfect symbol for one of the biggest points Brown drove home as he spoke to about 2,000 soldiers in McGinnis-Wickam Hall.

"When I was younger, the fog of war was not enough info," Brown said on a video feed that was also sent throughout the Army. "You really only had so much information you would get. And honestly, you wouldn't know."

Now, information comes in waves, Brown said, and it has become the new fog of war.

Brown said the information overload has created a problem that has to be addressed and managed. Brown, who has been in the Army for 34 years, pointed to the early days of his career when he was a second lieutenant.

"It was easier to have initiative," he said. "You could say, 'Let's go do something, anything' as a lieutenant. Nobody was going to second guess you because Lt. Brown only had a few pieces of information. Now, everything has changed. I don't know about you all, but I get about 150-170 emails a day. Then I still get all of the other correspondence -- and there are all the phone calls. There are overwhelming amounts of information out there."

Brown is responsible for Army leadership development and is currently commanding general of the United States Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

He is a former commanding general of Fort Benning and was charged with pulling the infantry and armor schools into the Maneuver Center of Excellence.

Brown has watched as the business sector has dealt with the same information overload issues. "They send me to talk to a lot of businesses and leaders," he said. "And the only thing the Army figured out clearly in the middle of two conflicts is you have to develop incredible trust in the organization. And you have to empower because you cannot react to all this information properly if you are micro managing a hierarchal structure. The Googles have figured it out. The Amazons have figured it out."

But you have to empower at the lowest levels of the organization, Brown said.

"A clerk there must be empowered and be more than a clerk," he said. "They must empower that clerk to meet the needs of the customer. Our customer is the public defending our nation. We have to take those overwhelming amounts of info, figure out how to make sense of golden nuggets that tell you what to do to make a decision that is effective."

Trust was one of the key topics of the day as Brown; Gen. David Perkins, leader of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command; Maj. Gen. Scott Miller, commander of the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning; and Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, commander of Fort Bragg and the 18th Airborne Corps, spoke on the first day of the three-day event.

Gen. Mark Milley, the Army's new Chief of Staff, addressed the conference via video. "Soldiers on the ground is the only way you win a war," Milley told the soldiers, who came from across the Army.

Perkins played off that land of thought. "In other domains, we buy things to combat other things," he said. "In the land domain, we build the capacity to win."

And winning is what it is all about, Perkins said.

"We don't want to fight; we want to win," he said. "That's why we develop capabilities to win."

This story was originally published September 15, 2015 at 10:35 PM with the headline "Lt. Gen. Brown says information overload creates issues for Army ."