4.3.2 The Network Centric Vision
The theory of Network Centric Warfare envisions a world in which fully networked military forces would be able to destroy completely any enemy force by conducting operations in that enemy’s cognitive domain. These operations would be aimed at completely disrupting the enemy’s decision-making process by changing his perception of reality before he is able to act upon that perception. By thus disrupting the enemy decision-making process, the networked force would, according to this vision, create an almost catatonic condition of “lock-out” in which the enemy would continually be re-observing, re-orienting, and re-deciding what to do, to the point that he either cannot react coherently or cannot act at all. To quote another book on Network Centric Warfare [4]:
The ability to hit many high-value targets simultaneously gives us the wherewithal to employ a strategy of shock and awe that can bring a situation to a conclusion far more rapidly than an attrition-based approach.
Two basic expectations inform this vision of shock and awe: the expectation that the effects of widely dispersed battlefield entities could be synergistically added to each other, and the expectation that our forces could take advantage of rapidly changing operational opportunities. The expected synergy would result from the network’s ability to coordinate effects from geographically dispersed forces [5]:
With Network Centric Warfare, we really can have the same thing in more than one place at the same time. This is because a sensor or shooter can now be in a position to engage many different targets without having to move.
The expected dynamic adaptability would result from the network’s ability to imbue quickly our forces with a common understanding of the battlefield; on the basis of this understanding, our force would keep one step ahead of the enemy by taking advantage of emerging opportunities before he would manage to foreclose them.
Presented as an emerging military response to the Information Age, this Network Centric Warfare vision aims at imprinting a strictly technological view of things upon what has hitherto been fundamentally a human enterprise. In this undertaking, the work of understanding and shaping the battlefield would be done by a network of sensors, weapons, and largely automated command centers, all exchanging data with each other by means of digital data links, while the work of leveraging this understanding to control the enemy’s cognitive processes as we pursue the final victory, would fall to the humans. In this vision, therefore, the network is the thing, which explains why it is that its proponents have settled upon the term Network Centric, rather than Network Enabled, Warfare when they were searching for a way of describing their views of warfare in the Information Age.