Curbing Innovation / 4 / 4.3 / 4.3.4

4.3.4 The Conditions That Color The Hypotheses

Taken together, these hypotheses establish the belief that networking and the collaboration enabled by it will produce a revolution in military affairs. The reason that these hypotheses lead to belief rather than certainty is that their validity requires a large number of conditions to be true. Although these conditions are sprinkled densely throughout the literature on Network Centric Warfare, one will be hard-put to find them because, more often than not, they are stated as challenges that one expects to overcome during the development of a Network-Centric Force, not as conditions of validity for the hypotheses that underlie the doctrine. However, notwithstanding this attempt to hide their import, the statements will remain conditions of validity until one can actually prove that they are no more than impediments. We prefer therefore to refer to them as condition of validity.

In what follows we mention but a few of these many conditions. The most important one of these conditions is the recognition that the hypothetical structure of the doctrine will not work unless the fog and friction of war can be kept under control. Using the modified language employed by the Network Centric Warfare doctrine which calls conditions impediments, Alberts says [9]:

The fog and friction of war may be significantly reduced but they will never go away. They will continue to be enemy number one. Learning how we can reduce them where possible and how to deal with them effectively if necessary is the fundamental challenge of Information Age Warfare.

In other words, reducing the fog and friction of war constitutes a challenge, not a condition of validity. The difference between reducing the fog and friction of war as challenge and reducing them as condition of validity is that the former presupposes the validity of the Network-Centric doctrine while the latter does not.

The second condition we wish to highlight here has to do with the implicit relationship between the four hypotheses. To assert the validity of each hypothesis, one must assert the validity of all preceding ones, and to realize the revolution in military affairs that the doctrine sees in networking, all hypotheses must be valid. But to get shared information from the sharing of information, shared knowledge from shared information, shared understanding from shared knowledge, and synchronization from shared understanding, one must assume that human individuality and human frailty do not intrude into the process of sharing. Humans must be able to accept information received from other humans, whether factual or documentary; must be able to handle without confusion large quantities of information; must be able to accept the compromise understanding despite any doubts they may still entertain about that compromise; and must be able to follow action orders that issue from that understanding without misunderstanding. The proponents of Network Centric Warfare recognize all this [10]:

Information quality is crucial because the entire Command and Control process depends on correctly perceiving the military situation and creating a common perception across all the actors. Not only must the situational monitoring be common, it must also be correctly perceived. These perceptions must not only be common and correct, but they must also be perceived as credible in the eyes of the users. If the Command and Control system fails to create confidence in its products on the part of the decision makers, the process will not be transformed.

However, when referring to this general condition of validity concerning the quality of the humans involved, the doctrine calls for adequate human factors programs rather than contemplate the possibility that the doctrine would fail comparison with reality on account of limitations natural to human performance [11]:

The most significant challenges to be faced include the development of an appropriately skilled, educated, and trained force.

The third condition concerns the enemy. Although the doctrine allows for independent action on the part of the enemy confronting us in battle, it fails to recognize the fact that such independence conditions the validity of the set of four hypotheses on which that theory rests. This failure goes back to the vision, according to which an enemy subjected to operations that grow out of our information advantage is expected to lose much of his ability to think independently. Therefore, the validity condition concerning enemy behavior has become an impediment that the success of the undertaking whose validity we assert has already overcome.

The final condition we shall mention here is information assurance. The doctrine of Network Centric Warfare recognizes the fundamental need for information assurance, by which they mean the joint set of five qualities: privacy, availability, integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation. An information system is private when no one, except authorized users, has access to it and when each user’s access is appropriate to their roles and responsibilities. When all of the authorized users have access to the system all of the time, the system is described as available. Integrity measures the extent to which outsiders can tamper with the system by deleting records and introducing false information. Authenticity refers to the degree to which the data, information, and knowledge in the system are valid and reliable representations of what was supplied by the authorized users. Finally, non-repudiation is a term used in Network Centric Warfare doctrine to indicate that each item in the information system can be traced back to its origin.

Now, each and all of these qualities may in fact be missing from the system, not because one did not try to create them, but because they are not physically attainable. In that case, the request for assurance becomes a condition for the validity of the doctrine. But, instead of recognizing this fact and consequently delaying development of the system until a sufficient level of confidence is developed concerning the possibility of ever attaining these qualities, the proponents treat them as so many challenges one meets along the way to a Network Centric force, challenges they exhort the community to confront [12]:

Measuring the security of an information system has become a major challenge and also an arena where a great deal more work is needed. Systematic reviews of all information assurance dimensions are rare and need to become more common.

Having thus redefined all conditions that predicate the validity of the Network-Centric hypotheses as challenges to overcome during the development of a networked force, the doctrine has taken it on faith that none of these challenges will prove in the event to have been intractable. Should that faith be betrayed by reality, the great expenditures involved in transforming the current force into a Network-Centric entity might prove to have been wasted. Before walking too far down the path to the promised revolution in military affairs, we should focus a lot more upon the validity of the underlying hypotheses than has been evidenced to date.