Addendum for a broader interpretation of centrally planned that includes stuff like hierarchy and strategy: information management is basically the reason. When soldiers disperse to forage, it takes a long time to get them back together again such that they are militarily effective; catching the enemy army at forage is extremely advantageous and practically guarantees winning. In the modern era, armies grew to the population of whole cities; this is too huge a burden for local resources to sustain in most places.
So the problem becomes how to keep them watered, fed and equipped, while simultaneously keeping them in close enough communication that they can coordinate to do the job they were sent for.
Interestingly this is an active area of inquiry for the US Army now: the reason is that we were in recent decades able to conduct operations almost free from interference because of air and naval supremacy, but we cannot take that for granted in a new regime of electronic warfare and area denial weapons. This has lead to the investigation of swarm tactics; the pitch for the individual soldiers is that instead of central coordination they operate under a small ruleset which tells what to do in various tactical situations. The goal is to mimic self-organizing systems in biology.
Also the word they have chosen for how these units are going to communicate is called “stigmergy” which is hilarious to me for some reason.
Addendum for a broader interpretation of centrally planned that includes stuff like hierarchy and strategy: information management is basically the reason. When soldiers disperse to forage, it takes a long time to get them back together again such that they are militarily effective; catching the enemy army at forage is extremely advantageous and practically guarantees winning. In the modern era, armies grew to the population of whole cities; this is too huge a burden for local resources to sustain in most places.
So the problem becomes how to keep them watered, fed and equipped, while simultaneously keeping them in close enough communication that they can coordinate to do the job they were sent for.
Interestingly this is an active area of inquiry for the US Army now: the reason is that we were in recent decades able to conduct operations almost free from interference because of air and naval supremacy, but we cannot take that for granted in a new regime of electronic warfare and area denial weapons. This has lead to the investigation of swarm tactics; the pitch for the individual soldiers is that instead of central coordination they operate under a small ruleset which tells what to do in various tactical situations. The goal is to mimic self-organizing systems in biology.
Also the word they have chosen for how these units are going to communicate is called “stigmergy” which is hilarious to me for some reason.