Implementation of Network-Centric War (NCW)

The following are excerpts of Government Document D 1.2:N 38, published by Dept. of Defense, Office of Force Transformation:

Network-centric warfare is an emerging theory of war in the Information Age. It is also a concept that, at the highest level, constitutes the military’s response to the Information Age. NCW is characterized by the ability of geographically dispersed forces to attain a high level of shared battlespace awareness that is exploited to achieve strategic, operational, and tactical objectives in accordance with the commander’s intent. This linking of people, platforms, weapons, sensors, and decision aids into a single network creates a whole that is clearly greater than the sum of its parts. The results are networked forces that operate with increased speed and synchronization and are capable of achieving massed effects, in many situations, without the physical massing of forces required in the past.

The implementation of NCW is first of all about human behavior as opposed to information technology. NCW theory has applicability at all three levels of warfare—strategic, operational, and tactical—and across the full range of military operations from major combat operations to stability and peacekeeping operations.

A networked force conducting network-centric operations (NCO) is an essential enabler for the conduct of effects-based operations by U.S. forces. Effects-based operations (EBO) are 'sets of actions directed at shaping the behavior of friends, neutrals, and foes in peace, crisis, and war.' EBO in the 21st century, enabled by networked forces, is a methodology for planning, executing, and assessing military operations designed to attain specific effects that achieve desired national security outcomes.

Governing Principles:
1. Fight first for Information superiority.
2. Access to information: shared awareness.
3. Speed of command and decision making.
4. Self-synchronization.
5. Dispersed forces: non-contiguous operations.
6. Demassification.
7. Deep sensor reach.
8. Alter initial conditions at higher rates of change.
9. Compressed operations and levels of war.

Fight First for Information Superiority: Generate an information advantage through better timeliness, accuracy, and relevance of information.

• Increase an enemy’s information needs, reduce his ability to access information, and raise his uncertainty.
• Assure our own information access through a well networked and interoperable force and protection of our information systems, including sensor systems.
• Decrease our own information needs, especially in volume, by increasing our ability to exploit all of our collectors.

Shared Awareness: Routinely translate information and knowledge into the requisite level of common understanding and situational awareness across the spectrum of participants in joint and combined operations.

• Build a collaborative network of networks, populated and refreshed with quality intelligence and non-intelligence data, both raw and processed, to enable forces to build a shared awareness relevant to their needs.
• Information users must also become information suppliers, responsible for posting information without delay. Allow access to the data regardless of location.
• High-quality shared awareness requires secure and assured networks and information that can be defended.

Speed of Command and Decision Making: Recognize an information advantage and convert it into a competitive advantage by creating processes and procedures otherwise impossible (within prudent risk).

• Through battlefield innovation and adaptation, compress decision timelines to turn information advantage into decision superiority and decisive effects.
• Progressively lock out an adversary’s options and ultimately achieve option dominance.

Self-Synchronization: Increase the opportunity for low-level forces to operate nearly autonomously and to re-task themselves through exploitation of shared awareness and the commander’s intent.

• Increase the value of subordinate initiative to produce a meaningful increase in operational tempo and responsiveness.
• Assist in the execution of the “commander’s intent.” Exploit the advantages of a highly trained, professional force.
• Rapidly adapt when important developments occur in the battlespace and eliminate the step function character of traditional military operations.

Dispersed Forces: Move combat power from the linear battlespace to non-contiguous operations.

• Emphasize functional control vice physical occupation of the battlespace and generate effective combat power at the proper time and place.
• Be non-linear in both time and space, but achieve the requisite density of power on demand.
• Increase close coupling of intelligence, operations, and logistics to achieve precise effects and gain temporal advantage with dispersed forces.

Demassification: Move from an approach based on geographically contiguous massing of forces to one based upon achieving effects.

• Use information to achieve desired effects, limiting the need to mass physical forces within a specific geographical location.
• Increase the tempo and speed of movement throughout the battlespace to complicate an opponent’s targeting problem.

Deep Sensor Reach: Expand use of deployable, distributed, and networked sensors, both distant and proximate, that detect actionable information on items of interest at operationally relevant ranges to achieve decisive effects.

• Leverage increasingly persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).
• Use sensors as a maneuver element to gain and maintain information superiority.
• Exploit sensors as a deterrent when employed visibly as part of an overt display of intent.
• Enable every weapon platform to be a sensor, from the individual soldier to a satellite.

Alter Initial Conditions at Higher Rates of Change: Exploit the principles of high-quality shared awareness, dynamic selfsynchronization, dispersed and de-massed forces, deep sensor reach, compressed operations and levels of war, and rapid speed of command to enable the joint force to swiftly identify, adapt to, and change an opponent’s operating context to our advantage. Warfare is highly path-dependent; hence, the imperative to control the initial conditions. The close coupling in time of critical events has been shown historically to have profound impact both psychologically and in locking out potential responses.

Compressed Operations and Levels of War: Eliminate procedural boundaries between Services and within processes so that joint operations are conducted at the lowest organizational levels possible to achieve rapid and decisive effects.

• Increase the convergence in speed of deployment, speed of employment, and speed of sustainment.
• Eliminate the compartmentalization of processes (e.g., organize, deploy, employ, and sustain) and functional areas (e.g., operations, intelligence, and logistics).
• Eliminate structural boundaries to merge capabilities at the lowest possible organizational levels, e.g., joint operations at the company/sub-squadron/task unit level.

Where Industrial Age warfare revolved around efforts to obtain overwhelming force and attrition, NCW revolves around information superiority16 and precision violence to dismantle an opposing force.

A survey of recent and emerging military theories and the future of war has led to the observation that, “In the 1990s, military theory reflected the rapid diffusion of conflict following the end of the bipolar Cold War world.” These theories ranged from John Mueller’s “obsolescence of major war” theory and Martin van Creveld’s argument that Western military theory derived from classical warfare had become obsolescent to Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s theory of “third wave” high-technology information warfare. According to the Tofflers and the Information Age theorists who followed them, the Gulf War of 1990–91 had provided a glimpse of postmodern war as the realm of high technology. On the other hand, military writers like Ralph Peters, Robert Kaplan, and Philip Cerny have offered visions of future war involving the “coming anarchy” of a world of failed states or a struggle by the West against a world of warrior cultures and paramilitaries. The intellectual challenge facing military professionals in the early 21st century is not, as some are suggesting, “to consign Carl von Clausewitz to the dustbin of history. Rather the task is to learn how to fight effectively across the spectrum of conflict.”18 The NCW theory of war, as it is implemented throughout the U.S. Armed Forces, addresses this formidable task.

Information Superiority is an imbalance in one’s favor in the information domain with respect to an adversary. The power of superiority in the information domain mandates that the United States fight for it as a first priority even before hostilities begin … The quality of the information position depends on the accuracy, timeliness, and relevance of information from all sources … The continuous sharing of information from a variety of sources enables the fully networked Joint Force to achieve the shared situational awareness necessary for decision superiority.

The required attributes and capabilities of a new joint force capable of conducting NCO must be carefully considered for each of these four domains:

Physical Domain: The physical domain is the traditional domain of warfare where a force is moved through time and space. It spans the land, sea, air, and space environments where military forces execute the range of military operations and where the physical platforms and communications networks that connect them reside. Comparatively, the elements of this domain are the easiest to measure and, consequently, combat power has traditionally been measured in the physical domain.

Information Domain: The information domain is the domain where information is created, manipulated, and shared. It is the domain that facilitates the communication of information among warfighters. This is the domain of sensors and the processes for sharing and accessing sensor products as well as “finished” intelligence. It is where C2 of military forces is communicated and the commander’s intent is conveyed. Consequently, it is increasingly the information domain that must be protected and defended to enable a force to generate combat power in the face of offensive actions by an adversary.

Cognitive Domain: The cognitive domain is in the mind of the warfighter. This is the realm of EBO. Many, though not all, battles, campaigns, and wars are won in this domain. The intangibles of leadership, morale, unit cohesion, level of training and experience, and situational awareness are elements of this domain. This is the domain where commander’s intent, doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures reside. This is also where decisive battlespace concepts and tactics emerge.

Social Domain: The social domain describes the necessary elements of any human enterprise. It is where humans interact, exchange information, form shared awareness and understandings, and make collaborative decisions. This is also the domain of culture, the set of values, attitudes, and beliefs held and conveyed by leaders to the society, whether military or civil. It overlaps with the information and cognitive domains, but is distinct from both. Cognitive activities by their nature are individualistic; they occur in the minds of individuals. However, shared sensemaking—the process of going from shared awareness to shared understanding to collaborative decision making—is a socio-cognitive activity because the individual’s cognitive activities are directly impacted by the social nature of the exchange and vice versa.

Domain intersections represent important, dynamic areas within which concept-focused experimentation should be conducted. The precision force so vital to the conduct of successful joint operations is created at the intersection of the information and physical domains. Shared awareness and tactical innovation occur at the intersection between the information and cognitive domains. Since many battles and campaigns are actually won or lost in the cognitive domain, this intersection is enormously important. The intersection between the physical and cognitive domains is where the time compression and “lock-out” phenomenon occur, where tactics achieve operational and even strategic effects, and where high rates of change are developed. NCW exists at the very center where all four domains intersect.

“Networked” is one of the seven attributes, identified by the JOpsC, that the future Joint Force must possess, the others being “fully integrated,” “expeditionary,” “decentralized,” “adaptable,” “decision superiority,” and “lethality.”

Horizontal Fusion—a Catalyst for Net-Centric Transformation: The term “horizontal” refers to the ability to reach across traditionally stove-piped organizations; and “fusion” refers to the process and applications that allow net-centric “melding.” Users will be able to seek the information they need across the battlespace through “smart-pull” and, in turn, information sharing. This process is described by the verbs task, post, process, and use (TPPU). With TPPU, the user can smart-pull information in seconds rather than minutes. To be effective, the TPPU process requires interoperable infrastructures within the DoD and across external U.S. and coalition intelligence-gathering organizations. Real-time collaboration allows users, regardless of their respective communities of interest, to share insights and add value to posted information; it will also allow geographically separated commanders and units to act as a cohesive team by sharing a common operational picture (COP).

Sense and Respond Logistics: An initiative sponsored by the Office of Force Transformation (OFT), Sense and Respond Logistics (SRL) is an emerging logistics concept tied closely to NCW theory and practice, as evidenced by some of its main characteristics: shared awareness, speed and coordination, dynamic synchronization, adaptability and flexibility, and networked organization. Units operating under the SRL concept are networked and dynamically synchronized to satisfy demand in response to changes in the environment. Therefore, all units within that network are potential consumers and providers of supply to and from all other units in the network.

Military competition is continuous and no military is as thoroughly studied as our own. As we have become more formidable on the traditional battlefield, potential adversaries have moved to the extremes of terrorism and irregular warfare at one end and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and catastrophic warfare at the other. Just as the Department must shift its focus to these extremes, so must it work to exploit NCW principles and sources of power there.