Talk:Network-centric warfare

Overall Rework

I'm starting a To-Do list here. I think it may be easier to initially restructure this article as a series of short sections with links to the (numerous) other pages that discuss salient aspects of NCW/NCO. Otherwise, we'll just duplicate all that other work. JXM 06:29, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Prior Discussion

I'm ading the stub tag intill some one adds the basics of the doctren and not only examples. --maayan 20:51, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Network centric warfare is not an exclusivly american docterine.All 1st world powers are moving into this direction.

One of the countries developing rapidly to a centric warfare enviroment is The Netherlands. Specially there army is building a centric warfare system. One of the conclusions at this point is that datacom by radio is a show stopper.

Information Revolution section POV

I put an NPOV warning on this section. It cites no references and sounds like propaganda. I also added a request for an expert for this whole article. --205.250.250.154 06:58, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree about with the propaganda comment. I have professional links with the NCW/NCO community and will try to find time to rework this article in the next few days. JXM 06:51, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Questions from someone who's researching this topic: Is this NPOV warning still valid? If so, what has been done to correct it? Inquiring minds want to know... --Gravinos ("Politics" is the stench that rises from human conflict.) 05:25, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

US Doctrine

Copied from User talk:Khendon I disagree with your addition of US military to the NCW page. The term extends beyond the US - see for example the extended international membership in the NCOIC (www.ncoic.org). Unless you have thoughts to the contrary, I'd recommend changing it back. JXM 04:24, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Hm. I'm not an expert, but I've always heard of NCW as a US doctrine. I know for sure that it's not a UK doctrine - there's a similar but subtly different doctrine called network-enabled operations. Perhaps we can fold that in though. --Khendon 07:28, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

How's that? I think it would be useful also to separate out the generic information about the doctrine from the purely US issues. --Khendon 07:48, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

The revised intro is certainly a bit sharper now, although the nuance about NCO being a broader term should probably be restored in some way. We should probably also redirect the UK NEO term here. Also, I support the idea of separating out US and generic issues.

I'll try to add something to the policy/org. issues this week. JXM 19:27, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I think different nations mean the same, but use different acronymns. In this case study, Sweden’s Use of Commercial Information Technology for Military Applications, which I found here[1], they do some comparisons between the Swedish (NBD) effort and the U.S. (NCW) effort. They also briefly mention the second tier nations progress. 83.248.166.70 09:04, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

No longer a stub

A significant amount of work has done on this article. I removed the stub tag. —ERcheck @ 13:09, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Pioneered

Hmmmm.... might that be changed to "pioneered in the War on Teror" or something to that effect? Because the other guys may not call it NCW, but at least on the strategic level they pretty much do the very same thing. The Iraq war is the first war in history that is de facto network-centric. Dysmorodrepanis 19:20, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

It is pretty clear you have no idea what network centric warfare is, nor how it affects units at the strategic, operational, nor tactical levels of war. The Iraqi army was highly centralized, but lacked any thing like an integrated picture of the war.

Unattributed text removed

I'm removing the following unattributed text from the article. Much of it appears to be drawn directly from sections of a 2005 research paper, which may be copyrighted in any case. See http://www.dsto.defence.gov.au/attachments/A_Dialectic_for_NCW-final_public_release.pdf)

The spirit of unity afforded by NCW comes at a price of dealing with individual differences. One might be forgiven for concluding from the tenets that one only has to provide the underlying communication infrastructure, and the rest will follow, tending to “… dramatically increase military effectiveness”. Each of the four tenets may in fact stifle military effectiveness.

We might view the NCW tenets as being like a lie to children. Simplifications allow for a first step in explanation on matters of great complexity to an immature audience. But strong simplifications are usually wrong; the issue is how badly and what decisions are made on their naïve basis? These over-simplifications have another insidious property, in that they appeal to the dreams of the military society. The NCW tenets promise to fulfil military dreams – the dream of omnipresence, the dream of omniscience, the dream of empowerment, the dream of omnipotence: and ‘all’ that is required to achieve it is the "field of dreams", namely investment in a network.

In the first tenet, networks are to deliver the "dream of omnipresence". The telecommunications industry records a litany of expensive failed attempts to predict markets by adopting the engineer’s field of dreams approach, advocated by the first tenet, and described by Alberts et al (1999) as "the entry fee". Just as more and better telecommunications networks and services do not make for assured societal uptake or profits for telecommunications companies, more and better networks in military operations do not necessarily lead to improved military effectiveness. Further, the call for strict adherence to an "architectural approach" to building the network means a focus on information architectures (products) rather than architecting information. The development of a "structured, disciplined and consistent framework" of standards compliant operational, systems and technical view products and plans, gives a false sense of confidence. These products do not imply that the information system design can be uniquely understood by any given designer or result in a consistent design, nor do they in any way guarantee the security, correctness or feasibility of even static and very simple networks. If these architectures were to provide such design guidance they would need to be underpinned by quantitative elements such as design equations, performance proofs, supporting analysis, models, simulations, design heuristics, et cetera…

So, the value of communication networks depends upon how they are used. The perceived wisdom is that shared situation awareness will result (tenet 2) by using the communication networks to disseminate a "common operating picture" (COP). This exhorts the "dream of omniscience". The track information and associated “dots on maps” displays currently associated with a COP, only address the perception aspect of situation awareness. They identify some objects of interest in space and time, but they fail to disclose the significance of those situations (comprehension), and they fail to identify the consequence of those situations for our own intent (projection). Inconsistencies are inevitable in any NCW system. The "common as consistency" (see consistency proof) approach of pretending that they will not occur is an untenable solution. Treating "common as consistency" mistakes consistency for unity and lacks robustness because consistency eliminates diversity.

Tenet 3 exhorts the "dream of empowerment". A significant problem with NCW is that no-one ever says how the self-synchronisation (tenet 3) of capability is to be done?

Given the significant shortcomings in effectiveness identified individually for each of the first three tenets, there appears to be little hope that the fourth tenet, the "dream of omnipotence" representing the collective sequence or product of the first three, could be afforded anything other than a more pessimistic assessment. Further, it is unclear from tenet 4 what effective really means. There is no notion of intentions explicitly evident in the NCW thesis. Considering the NCW genesis in information superiority, we might look to this as a source for understanding effectiveness, but would be disappointed to find, of course, that possessing information superiority alone does not ensure mission effectiveness. Indeed, possessing firepower superiority alone does not ensure mission effectiveness, either.

JXM 00:57, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Merger Proposal

I propose that the stub article Netcentric warfare be deleted and replaced by a redirect to this article. Any objections? ComputerGeezer (talk) 18:22, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Seems pretty straight forward. --User:SelfStudyBuddy^TALK-- 12:52, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

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