@Klebert L. Hall: Irrelevant. I don't really care about the politics of whether they made the right decisions or not. (Besides I wasn't making digs at US or Soviet policy one way or another.)

My point is modern battlefield commanders are getting less and less time to evaluate more and more data. They to learn a lot of rules of thum, gain experience and coping skills to filter out the irrelevant data from the crucial data.

As modern military systems become more rapidly evolving and tightly integrated, the commanders are becoming the weak link.

Sure the decision is ultimately binary or over a limited set of options but they are getting less and less time to make them while their high tech tools throw more and more data at them. Which little piece of data is crucial, which piece of data is actually knowledge, not just information?

Years ago the science program, Nova, reported on this problem. They cited rather embarrassing stories about military pilots shutting off most of their avionics and sensing gear just before dog fights because most of it was distracting—even it if could be potentially life threatening. They'd just go into combat shooting down things and evading missiles the old fashioned way, by eyeballing it.

DARPA has spent billions for many decades on just this problem. So far with limited success. It's really a problem in intelligence amplification.

For example, suppose a battlefield commander could control a complex military system, like an army or a flight of planes in the same way, martial artists control their own bodies during a fight? Almost subconsciously, definitely intuitively and extremely flexible and reactive. The battlefield commander is the brain that hasn't be adequately hooked up to the body yet.

See what I'm getting at?

Roboticizing the military is only going to make this problem worse until we figure out how to hook the brain up to the body.