Curbing Innovation / 4 / 4.4

4.4 CONCLUSION

With this description of the Network Centric doctrine of war, our journey through history has finally reached the present. In the process, we have not only understood how we got to where we are today, but we have also understood the reasons that guided us along the way. As we have already pointed out in the introduction to this book, this understanding is essential if we are to pass judgment upon the wisdom of undertaking the Network Centric transformation of our military forces. Specifically, we have found that military technology has come to be considered useful only if it was developed to serve a national-security interest that had been envisioned in advance, and that the combination of this process of developing technology upon command with the deliberative method of systems analysis ensures that the military establishment will in fact acquire only useful technologies.

From this vantage point, the Network Centric doctrine looks puzzling. For, instead of following the well trodden path of command technology which would have required that the proponents make an effort to justify their development of information technology in terms of some pre-existing security need, this doctrine squarely rests on the proposition that information technology would revolutionize war, a proposition that would justify information technology in terms of security advantages yet to come. Network Centric Warfare appears therefore to be an anomaly to the historic pattern western nations have followed to date. In fact, as indicated in Section 4.3, the Network Centric doctrine was able to appear and prosper precisely because the orderly pattern of acquisition embodied in the institution of command technology has recently began to lose its sway over our military establishment.

This observation should make us suspicious about the tantalizing attraction that the Network Centric doctrine seems to have upon the defense community and suggests that we subject the doctrine to particular scrutiny before accepting it. This task is undertaken in the next chapter.