Fergie's Tech Blog

Waging War In The Non-Existent Battlefield Of Cyberspace

A UPI newswire article by Lawrence Sellin, via SpaceWar, reports that:

Prompted by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Internet revolution, Network Centric Warfare has become one of the latest iterations in attempts by the Department of Defense to formulate a coherent framework to transform our military forces and address future threats. It became the centerpiece of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's attempt to transform the U.S. military.

"We must achieve: fundamentally joint, network-centric, distributed forces capable of rapid decision superiority and massed effects across the battlespace," Rumsfeld said. "Realizing these capabilities will require transforming our people, processes, and military forces. U.S. forces must leverage information technology and innovative network-centric concepts of operations to develop increasingly capable joint forces. New information and communications technologies hold promise for networking highly distributed, joint and multinational forces."

As military historian and theorist Frederick W. Kagan once suggested, NCW diminished Pentagon angst by providing that framework to transform the force. That is, build everything around the network. The concrete manifestation was investment in precision munitions, the communications and analytical tools needed to provide them with targets, and the platforms needed to launch them.

posted by Fergie @ 11/11/2008 10:23:00 PM