4.3 THE BIRTH OF THE NETWORK CENTRIC DOCTRINE OF WARFARE
While systems analysis is thus preoccupied with the problem of the planning scenario and concerned about the weakening of its influence at the hands of modeling and simulation, the shackles that kept command technology subservient to the overarching goal of providing for the security of the nation have gradually been loosened. This allowed command technology to march, free and largely uncontrolled, to a tune of its own making. This newly found freedom has made it possible for command technology to develop and proselytize a new doctrine of warfare explicitly designed to justify the developmental direction that it wanted to pursue.
This doctrine, called Network Centric Warfare, puts forth a vision of how future wars will unfold, a vision based upon a set of conditional hypotheses in which the conditions, originally reflecting concerns with the validity of those hypothesis, have been transfigured into so many mere tasks to be executed in the implementation process of the original vision. The Network Centric vision consists in the suggestion that future wars will be prosecuted and won more in the minds of the enemy than on the battlefields of his country; the hypotheses supporting this vision are a series of assertions laying out the way in which information technology will help us access and control the mind of the enemy; and the conditions appended to these hypotheses are a long list of assumptions about the world that would have to be true if the set of Network Centric hypotheses were to be valid.
To do full justice to the proponents of Network Centric Warfare, this synoptic representation of their doctrine is given a patient and detailed explanation in the remainder of this chapter. Our aim is to explain, rather than merely describe, the theory of Network Centric Warfare. Therefore, we highlight its fundamental presuppositions, describe its intellectual structure, and identify the view of the world upon which it stands, before summarizing its story line. But, we cannot do so without first learning how to speak the Network Centric language and understanding just how that language differs from common English.