Over the Horizon: The Persistent Temptation of Network-Centric Warfare

Ten years ago, the concept of "network-centric warfare" dominated U.S. military thinking and deployment. An outgrowth of work associated with the Revolution in Military Affairs, network-centric warfare envisioned a battle space in which information dominance and standoff killing power gave the U.S. military supremacy across the combat spectrum. Influential in doctrine and acquisitions, network-centric warfare offered the tempting promise of eliminating Carl von Clausewitz' fog of war, making the battlefield legible and, for well-prepared U.S. forces, malleable. Platforms such as the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship and DDG-1000, the Army's Future Combat System, and the F-35 multirole combat aircraft were envisioned to play key roles in a "system of systems" capable of taking apart and rendering inert an enemy military organization. In one sense, network-centric warfare represented a remarkably optimistic vision of what a well-structured, well-oiled government bureaucracy might do when given the appropriate tools. Knowledge, in the right hands and going in the right direction, literally meant power.

Perhaps inevitably, problems emerged when that vision met reality. Although the U.S. military quickly disassembled Saddam Hussein's army in 2003, it had great difficulty with the insurgency that followed. The battle space in post-invasion Iraq, made up in large part of human beings, proved troublingly opaque. In many cases, too much information proved as problematic as not enough. Network-centric warfare didn't exactly fail, but most now recognize that it conceived of information dominance in overly simplistic terms, especially in the context of wars against substate actors, like insurgents or terrorist organizations. ...