Network Centric Warfare: Network Centric Warfare: Revolutionizing Military Strategy and Operations

By Fouad Sabry

What is Network Centric Warfare

Network-centric warfare, also called network-centric operations or net-centric warfare, is a military doctrine or theory of war that aims to translate an information advantage, enabled partly by information technology, into a competitive advantage through the computer networking of dispersed forces. It was pioneered by the United States Department of Defense in the 1990s.

How you will benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Network-centric warfare

Chapter 2: Defense Information Systems Agency

Chapter 3: United States Joint Forces Command

Chapter 4: Brain–computer interface

Chapter 5: Global Information Grid

Chapter 6: NCOW

Chapter 7: NetOps

Chapter 8: Command and control

Chapter 9: John J. Garstka

Chapter 10: Battlespace

(II) Answering the public top questions about network centric warfare.

Who this book is for

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of Network Centric Warfare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: May 27, 2024

Book preview

Chapter 1: Network-centric warfare

A military doctrine or theory of war known as network-centric warfare, also known as network-centric operations or net-centric warfare, aims to transform an information advantage, made possible in part by information technology, into a competitive advantage through the computer networking of dispersed forces. The United States Department of Defense invented it in the 1990s.

The term system of systems was first used by Admiral William Owens in a 1996 report written for the Institute for National Security Studies in the United States. He provided an explanation of a system of intelligence sensors, command and control systems, and precision weapons that offered situational awareness, quick target evaluation, and distributed weapon assignment.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States published Joint Vision 2010 in 1996 as well, which debuted the military idea of full-spectrum dominance. Full Spectrum Dominance was the term used to represent the US military's capacity to control the battlespace across a range of activities, from peacekeeping to the direct use of armed force, thanks to the benefits of information superiority.

The term network-centric warfare and related concepts initially emerged in the book Copernicus: C4ISR for the 21st Century by the US Department of Navy. This article summarizes the concepts of networking sensors, commanders, and shooters to flatten the hierarchy, shorten operational pauses, improve precision, and speed up command. But network-centric warfare as a unique idea first came to the public's attention in a 1998 US Naval Institute Proceedings paper by Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski and John Garstka. However, the Command and Control Research Program's book Network Centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority by David S. Alberts, John Garstka, and Frederick Stein contains the first comprehensive explanation of the concept (CCRP). A number of case studies on how businesses were utilizing information and communication technology to enhance situation analysis, precisely manage inventories and production, and keep tabs on customer interactions were used to develop a new theory of warfare in this book.

Understanding Information Age Combat (UIAW), written by Alberts, Garstka, Richard Hayes of Evidence Based Research, and David A. Signori of RAND, came after network-centric warfare in 2001. To create an operational theory of warfare, UIAW emphasized the implications of the changes noted by network-centric warfare.

UIAW describes three domains after stating a number of premises regarding how the environment is perceived. The first is a physical realm, where things happen and are noticed by both people and sensors. The information domain is used to communicate data that emerges from the physical domain. Prior to action, it is processed in the cognitive domain.

The procedure is comparable to Col. John Boyd of the USAF's observe, orient, decide, act loop.

The CCRP's Power to the Edge, which also dealt with the theory of network centric warfare, was the final book to address it. Power to the Edge is a speculative text that contends that contemporary military conditions are far too complicated for any one person, group, or even military service to comprehend.

Modern information technology makes it possible to share information quickly and effectively to the point where edge entities, or those who are essentially running their own military operations, should be able to pull information from widely dispersed repositories rather than relying on centralized organizations to foresee their information needs and push it to them. However, this would involve a significant flattening of conventional military hierarchies.

The Pentagon had been looking into Power To The Edge's radical theories at least since 2001. Peer-to-peer activity and more conventional hierarchical data flow in the network were both introduced in UIAW.

Soon after, the Pentagon started funding peer-to-peer research, telling software engineers at a peer-to-peer conference in November 2001 that the battlefield benefits from the redundancy and robustness of a peer-to-peer network topology.

The former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's ongoing transformation initiative at the Department of Defense is built upon network-centric warfare and operations. Additionally, it is one of the five objectives of the Office of Force Transformation inside the Department of Defense.

For further details on what is currently referred to as defense transformation or transformation, see Revolution in Military Affairs.

The Global Information Grid (GIG) will serve as the main technical foundation for US network-centric operations and warfare, according to US DOD regulations. This instruction calls for the GIG to eventually connect all sophisticated weapon platforms, sensor networks, and command and control facilities. The outcomes of these kinds of extensive integration efforts are frequently referred to as systems of systems.

The subject of Net-Centric Enterprise Services deals with the GIG's application context.

Technical efforts are being taken by a number of key U.S. military programs to facilitate network-centric warfare. The US Navy's Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) and the US Army's BCT Network are two examples of this.

The United States Department of Defense's network-centric combat objectives are met through Net-Centric Enterprise Technologies for Interoperability (NESI), which offers practical advice for all stages of the purchase of net-centric solutions. The guidelines in NESI are derived from the higher level, more abstract notions presented in numerous directives, rules, and requirements such the ASD(NII) Net-Centric Checklist and the NCOW RM (Net-Centric Operations and Warfare Reference Model).

The concept of team warfare, which refers to the integration and synchronization of all appropriate capabilities across the various services, ranging from the Army to the Air Force to the Coast Guard, serves as the highest level of guidance for the network-centric warfare doctrine for the US armed forces. This is a component of the combined warfare tenet.

Network-centric warfare's guiding principles include:

Tenet 1: A force with a strong network facilitates information sharing.

Tenet 2: Cooperation and information exchange improve the quality of information and situational awareness.

Tenet 3: Self-synchronization is enabled through shared situational knowledge.

Tenet 4: As a result, mission effectiveness is significantly increased.

Theoretically, Net-Centric operations are compatible with Mission Command doctrine, giving combat soldiers a great deal of flexibility of action, The Joint Tactical Radio System's (JTRS) complexity sheds light on the difficulties involved in fusing a wide variety of communications systems into a cohesive whole. It aims to be a software-defined radio for battlefield communications that can be retrofitted to a very wide range of existing military and civilian radio systems.

The GAO FCS report from April 10, 2008 identified the network's scalability as a significant risk factor for the Network Centric FCS program. All of the units cannot be connected by the proposed system in a self-forming, self-healing network.

When every piece of mobile equipment and every person involved in a combat becomes