Throwing Batteries at the Enemy

The other day, one of my students in the military posed an interesting dilemma that is increasingly becoming common: as soldiers carry more and more electronics, they need more and more batteries to keep them running. And in the middle of battle, you cannot simply go to a store to reload batteries or plug in a charger into a nearby wall socket. You carry your spare batteries with you and pray that you have enough to last the mission.

But the laws of anatomy and physiology put a limit on what you can carry on your back. Most soldiers carry 60 lbs of equipment in a backpack along with armor and weaponry. At a hundred pounds you are stretching the limits of human endurance. In the spirit of enduring improvement, the US Marine Corps has been stretching the limits with technology, with the Individual Load Bearing Equipment (ILBE) Marine backpack. The ILBE has arguably been responsible for a number of shoulder and other back related injuries http://www.10news.com/news/24360304/detail.html. Even more loads will likely land on the back of the hapless soldier from all the research on exoskeletons.

The fact of the matter, my student said, is that a military mission demands that the soldier's primary payload always be armor and weaponry closely followed by food and sustenance. Batteries are somewhere low down in the list of priorities. And to trade off lethality and self-defense against electronics and batteries, is a tradeoff that can result in loss of life and unsuccessful warfighting missions.

The ludicrous spectacle of soldiers hurling batteries and laptops at the enemy as a gambit of last resort during retreats is rapidly approaching as we "smarten" up the business of fighting war and killing with battery laden gadgets and weaponry.

So how much battery is enough battery? And how much of the tradeoff of the load on the back for ammo and food in favor of gadgets and batteries? This is the eternal battle between the actual task of warfighting in the trenches compared to the need for command and control from the top - and the need for command and control usually wins out.

The "battery problem" pattern is one that has manifested itself in many ways in architecture. Protocol overhead vs message content; Value adding processes vs support processes; Management vs Worker; and even politically - the 99% vs the 1!

In the world of information and data architectures we are facing the same dilemma. Substitute information content for food and ammunition and metadata for batteries and gadgets. As we try to increase the amount of metadata around each piece of "real information", we start stuffing "context data" batteries into the backpack of "content data". Arguably, some of the metadata is essential for establishing context, but often we reach a point where the batteries have taken over the backpack - 90% of our communications bandwidth is spent sending context and not content. 90% of our storage capacity is spent storing context and not content. The Defense Department's assumption that all data must be potentially discoverable places the need to coat content richly with large doses of metadata to provide context for all the people trying to discover that content.

Reminds me of my early childhood in the "Wild West" India of the 1960s when addresses with house and street numbers were not enough to direct the rickshaw driver or postman but had to be supplemented with landmarks, names of nearby famous people and proximity to large bodies of water. The house number, the street name and later the postal code allowed us to focus directly on the destination without the surrounding context data. We seem to be going back to the 1960s again.