[Infowarrior] - Twilight Of Network-Centric Warfare

[Richard Forno]

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LexingtonInstitute.org

August 6, 2010

Early Warning Blog

The Twilight Of Network-Centric Warfare

Author: Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D.

When a Defense Business Board task force recommended last month that the
Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) eliminate its networking and
information integration secretariat, it signaled just how far from grace the
notion of network-centric warfare has fallen. The secretariat was
established at the tail-end of the dot.com boom to coordinate the joint
force's migration from industrial-age warfare into the era of information
warfare. Proponents of network-centric warfare believed new information
technologies were so powerful that they could overthrow traditional
warfighting concepts if backed up with appropriate military doctrine and
organizations. OSD's office of networks and information integration -- NII
for short -- was supposed to shepherd this vision into reality by overseeing
a raft of multi-billion-dollar investment projects.

A decade later, nobody talks about military transformation anymore, and
joint initiatives begun under its banner such as the Transformational
Communications Satellite and Future Combat System are fading memories.
Service-level projects like the Navy's Next-Generation Enterprise Network
increasingly look like wasteful efforts to re-invent the wheel -- efforts
that are doomed to be canceled as Washington turns to deficit reduction and
military budgets shrink. So what went wrong? How is it possible for every
policymaker in the five-sided building to embrace a common vision of
information-age warfare at the beginning of a decade, and for it all to be
forgotten by decade's end?

The first thing that went wrong was that threats evolved differently than
military planners expected. The authors of network-centric warfare thought
that the joint force was in the midst of a prolonged "strategic pause" when
the decade began, after which some new peer or near-peer adversary would
emerge. That pause ended unexpectedly on 9-11, and America suddenly found
itself facing a very different kind of danger. Networks and information
technology have certainly proven useful in dealing with elusive new
adversaries, but so far they haven't proven to be the winning weapon that
visionaries expected. It turns out that all those networks the Pentagon was
planning are just conduits, and that what matters more for victory is the
accuracy and completeness of the information moving through the networks.

The second problem that proponents did not see coming was that the new
technology itself might become a source of weakness. Planners implicitly
assumed that if the Pentagon invested heavily enough in cutting-edge
networks and information applications, it could leverage the warfighting
potential of the new technology while staying comfortably ahead of other
countries with similar ideas. Well, it hasn't worked out that way. We now
know that everybody from the Taliban to Mexican drug cartels can benefit
from the reach and richness of wideband networks. Even worse, they can tap
into our own networks, as China proves on a daily basis. So the military has
had to launch a crash program to prevent its gee-whiz networks from being
used against it (incidentally, the Navy is inexplicably trying to replace
the one big network that so far has proven largely immune to hostile
penetrations, in order to implement a more "advanced" architecture).

And then there is the cost of network-centrism. When the decade began,
America was basking in the prosperity of the dot.com revolution, generating
nearly a third of all global economic output. Since then its economy has
swooned and tax receipts have collapsed to a point where over 40 percent of
the federal budget is being borrowed. So one by one, all of the big
networking initiatives begun during the Bush years are being canceled. That
isn't so hard to do since there are no immediate consequences for
warfighters and the projects never developed firm political constituencies.
The Defense Business Board's proposal to kill the Pentagon's networking shop
is just the latest installment in what has become a long-running chronicle
of decline. No doubt about, networks have changed the way the world wages
war. But network-centric warfare is an idea whose time has passed.