Network-Centric Warfare

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

This contrasted sharply with the situation of the opposing commander, Admiral Villeneuve. His force was larger and in many ways technologically superior, but it lacked any semblance of the cerebral networking Nelson had forged. The French ship captains and subordinate commanders had spent most of the war blockaded in port. They distrusted Villeneuve, even as Villeneuve distrusted his own judgment. Added to this was the problem of coordinating with a Spanish fleet, with which the French had never before operated. The best Villeneuve could do was to form his ships into a conventional eighteenth-century line of battle, foreseeing an engagement in which two ordered, parallel battle lines would pound each other until most of the ships of one side or the other struck their colors, blew up, or sank. When Nelson refused battle on these terms and in stead broke through the French-Spanish line, the pace of operation that he thereby forced on the French and Spanish immediately exceeded their ability to cope and invalidated their numerical superiority. Villeneuve largely lost control of his forces and with it the ability to fight a coherent battle. In such conditions his ships, though they fought bravely, could only contribute to the general chaos; a substantial proportion never entered the battle at all.

Network-centric operations can, after a fashion, replicate the cerebral networking of Nelson's band of brothers without the eight years of combat preparation and without the slow tempo of battle at sea that facilitated situational awareness in the early nineteenth century. However, there is a hitch: What would happen if one side's edge of chaos did not lie entirely on one side of the other's but crossed it (figure 10), producing a second asymmetric zone, in which the advantages were reversed?

This reversal points to a dangerously misleading assumption underlying much thinking today about the "revolution of military affairs": that the United States will always be technologically superior and thus fight faster and better. In reality, tempo of operations is not solely a function of technology; it is also a function of the centralization of command. One can choose to trade centralized control for speed and scope of operations. This may forgo some of the ability to mass effects on a specific objective, but if the effect sought derives from the pace and scope of the attacks rather than from the amount of destruction, or from a cumulative impact rather than specific actions, then this trade-off may be acceptable. In other words, one could confront a technologically superior enemy by creating a new asymmetric zone in which small, decentralized units could operate successfully but in which an opponent using large formations under centralized control could not respond coherently.

The importance of this fourth zone is even more evident if we plot the respective edges of chaos on a graph with three axes (figure 11)--one for pace, one for scale, and a separate orthogonal axis for scope. This presentation highlights two aspects of decentralization: forces can be broken into smaller, self-synchronized units, and they can be dispersed over a wide area to make co-ordinated and timely response by the other side more difficult. These points correspond rather closely to Maoist theory of guerrilla warfare. Guerrillas use dispersed formations so small that they cannot be targeted effectively by heavier government forces. These bands then conduct many small raids, so rapidly that the raiders are gone before opposing forces can be brought to bear. Since the desired effect, attrition of an opponent's will, depends more on pace and scope than on damage to specific targets, control can remain highly decentralized. This was the essential problem the United States confronted in Vietnam.