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Network-Centric Warfare

Naval War College Review, Wntr, 2001 by Edward A. Smith, Jr.

What's the Point?

What is network-centric warfare? What's the point? Many attempts to answer these questions emphasize the "network" and the new technologies used to create more effective sensor and communications architectures. These architectures, it is argued, will enable us to create and exploit a common situational awareness, increase our speed of command, and "get inside the enemy's OODA [observe, orient, decide, and act] loop." [1] Yet such descriptions of technologies and capabilities can leave us asking the same questions: What is it? Just what does it bring to warfare? Why is it so critical to America's future military power that we must give up other capabilities to buy it?

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These questions highlight the need for a warfare-centered working concept of network-centric operations. Such conceptual work can help us both recognize the potential in networking and discern its limits and limitations. It also can pro vide a fundamental understanding of the role of network-centric operations on the battlefield and across the spectrum from peace through war. An evolving working concept is, in short, the first step in designing a network-centric "navy after next."

Using technology to multiply the impact of military forces seems almost axiomatic. The problem is in identifying which technological combinations hold the most potential. Information technology is one obvious force multiplier, but what we really face are three concurrent technological revolutions. [2]

The first is in sensor technology. The sensor revolution is twofold: one movement toward sensors able to achieve near-real-time surveillance over vast areas, and another toward smaller, cheaper, more numerous sensors that can be netted to detect, locate, identify, and track targets. Together, these trends can produce systems that will provide the quantity and quality of data needed to create a "situational awareness" that is "global in scope and precise in detail." [3] The second revolution is in information technology. The information revolution will bring the geometric increase in computing power necessary to process, collate, and analyze this vast quantity of sensor data, and it will provide means to distribute information to any recipient or "shooter" anywhere in the world at near-real-time speeds. The third is in weapons technology. The weapons revolution is a matter of increasing numbers of precise munitions by reducing costs. It, like the sensor revolution, is twofold. Better streams of targeting data can permit a "dumbing down" of expensive guidance packages, while new designs, electronics, "lean" manufacturing, and mass production can decrease the cost for a given level of accuracy and capability. [4]

In the coming decade, these revolutions will interact and multiply each other's impacts and create a kaleidoscope of potential synergies that will change the character of war as we know it. [5] These revolutions and this change in how we think about war have come to be embodied in the idea of network-centric operations.

NETWORK-CENTRIC OPERATIONS

The first step in creating a working concept for network-centric operations is identifying the key changes that grow from the triple technological revolution. One change, clearly, is the increased precision and speed that may now be possible in military operations. Speed and precision make it feasible to exploit specific battlefield opportunities and operate at a pace calculated to overwhelm an enemy's capacity to respond. They also offer a highly agile force, able to change from one rapid, precise operation to another at will and able to compress complex targeting processes to fit the nearly real-time dimensions of the battlefield. These emerging possibilities signal changes in how we wage war.

The leading network-centric proponents explain the impact of network-centric warfare in this manner. In traditional military operations, a mission is assigned and planned, forces are generated, and operations are executed to concentrate power on an objective. This is a highly coordinated, "stepped" cycle: periods of relative inaction, during which forces are generated and actions coordinated (the flat part of the step) alternate with periods of action, when combat power is applied (the vertical part). However, if forces were networked to create near-real-time situational awareness (see figure 1), we could act continuously. We would no longer need to pause before deciding on further action; the information and coordination needed would already be there. Moreover, shared awareness would permit a flattened, decentralized command structure, with decisions made at the lowest practical level of command--a "self-synchronization" that would permit us to reclaim "lost combat power." Then, as we train and organize to optimize these capabilities, the pace of these semi-independent operations would accelerate further to permit a new "speed of command." This description makes clear that network- centric operations are really about optimizing combat power--that is, combat efficiency.

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Government Industry

Network-Centric Warfare

Naval War College Review, Wntr, 2001 by Edward A. Smith, Jr.

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