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Network-Centric Warfare
Naval War College Review, Wntr, 2001 by Edward A. Smith, Jr.
While equating accelerated, self-synchronized operations to increased combat efficiency makes intuitive sense, it needs further explanation. One approach is to look at the above-mentioned "steps" in the context of the well known work of Colonel John Boyd, U.S. Air Force, but treating OODA loops as a succession of linear cycles overlaid on the steps. [6] Boyd's "observe" "orient," and "decide" phases then would equate to the flat part of a step, while the "act" phase would be the vertical. Plotted on axes of time (x) versus cumulative application of military force (y), the steps become OODA cycles, with each "act" adding to the total of the military force applied (see figure 2).
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This construct of a combat cycle brings us to look not just at decision making but also at the parallel process of generating combat power. For example, the "observe" process includes both the decision to observe certain activities and the physical actions needed to acquire the intelligence, surveillance, and targeting data and then transmit it to the right people or systems. New sensor and information technologies can compress this process significantly, but there is a limit to how much. To optimize the impact of precision, we need more than sensor-based awareness; we need to identify specific vulnerabilities, and to do that we need to know the enemy. Such knowledge draws on sensor information--and will be subject to some time compression as a result--but it also depends on regional expertise and on intelligence databases developed long be fore the battle begins. Thus, the new sensors and information technology can shorten the cycle only to the degree that long-term collection and analysis are already available on the net.
A similar limit emerges in the combined "orient and decide" phase. [7] Better awareness helps us avoid mistakes and use assets more efficiently, but we must still complete a set of physical actions to generate military power. We may have to move an aircraft carrier into range of the objective, plan and brief a mission, fuel and arm aircraft, and launch them. We may also have to deliver follow-on air strikes to achieve an objective. The pace of these actions is determined by the physical capabilities of systems and people; a carrier can move only so fast, and flight deck operations can be hurried along only so much. "Efficiency" here is as much a function of how we organize, train, and equip our forces as it is of information flows. The same is true of the "act" phase. Once in the air, aircraft must proceed toward the target and then-at a time dependent on the speed and range of the weapons used and the distance they must travel--launch their ordnance.
To increase combat efficiency, therefore, we must accelerate both parts of the combat cycle, the OODA cycle and the process of generating combat power. A strike-sortie-generation demonstration conducted by USS Nimitz (CVN 68) in 1997 is a good example of how these two elements come together. [8] Nimitz used only a rudimentary network to aid targeting and decision making, but it then focused on optimizing the operations of the carrier and the air wing to make better use of the increased information that the network made available. For this demonstration, among other things, Nimitz added pilots to its air wing, introduced new high-speed cyclical operations, and relied on accompanying missile ships for air defense. [9] The result was a fourfold increase in sorties over a four-day period. Arming each aircraft with multiple precision weapons, each of which could reliably destroy an aim point, further multiplied the effect. The battle group thus established a faster, more efficient power-generation cycle, one that produced--when combined with networks' ability to identify the "targets that count" in commensurate numbers--an order-of-magnitude increase in the group's combat efficiency.
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