Curbing Innovation / 5 / 5.1

5.1 THE ECONOMIC PEDIGREE OF NETWORK CENTRIC WARFARE

It is well known that the proponents of Network Centric Warfare claim its legitimacy from events that have recently taken place in the world economy. On the face of it, the military establishment’s desire to take the economic establishment as its model must strike one as rather strange. For, while it is true that violence can often be found in the market place, the free market and the battlefield are two distinct worlds. The economy aims at producing wealth through a free market; war aims at destroying wealth through violent action. The economy operates within the confines of societal rules; in war, there are no rules to hamper a nation’s warlike spirit. A beaten economic competitor usually stays beaten, while a defeated nation will inevitably live on to fight another day. More importantly however for our argument here, war displays a significantly less graceful reaction to human error than does the free market; making the wrong decision in war is more likely to be catastrophic to society than making the wrong decision in the market place.

The notion that war is business is not a mere figure of speech for the proponents of Network Centric Warfare; the idea impregnates much of their writings. To quote but one of the many examples that populate the field, David Alberts says in his book [1] that:

military operations should be designed to accomplish a task or solve a problem.

In other words, the purpose of warfare is problem solving, much like the job of a business manager would be to solve the problems occurring in his division. By contrast, Clausewitz [2] says that:

war is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.

Note how the hostility-based determination to submit the enemy to our will has given way to the more neutral concept of problem solving that guides the thinking of the Network-Centric-Warfare proponents.

Clausewitz cautioned us against this peace-time tendency to think about the bloodshed of war in more philanthropic, or in this case more business-like, terms [3]:

He who uses force unsparingly, without reference to the bloodshed involved, must obtain a superiority if his adversary uses less vigor in its application. This is the way in which the matter must be viewed and it is to no purpose, it is even against one’s interest, to turn away from the consideration of the real nature of the affair because the horror of its elements excite repugnance.

In any event, even if one were to accept the proposition that war is business, the lessons learned by the proponents of Network Centric Warfare from what was happening in the market place at the time of its creation, are hardly persuasive. Thus, it was suggested that economy B, as the proponents call the information-driven sector of our economy, is a truly new form of economic activity exhibiting new forms of behavior. To quote from Vice Admiral Cebrowski’s seminal paper published in the January 1998 issue of the Proceedings of the Naval Institute [4],

Economy A is characterized by stability, market share equilibrium, and decreasing return on investment. Economy B is characterized by extraordinary growth and wealth generation, increasing returns on investment, the absence of market share equilibrium, and the emergence of mechanisms for product lock-in.

While all these observations were fleetingly true a few years ago, they did not herald a new economy in which, the laws of supply and demand that govern Economy A have been turned on their head. Rather, they represented no more than the special features characterizing periods of fundamental innovation which routinely occur in the economy.

The overarching concern in such an innovation phase of the economy is not the immediate generation of wealth but the successful establishment of the innovation. To accomplish that, producers of alternative forms of implementing the innovation would lower prices to addict the consumer to their own version of the innovation and thus lock out the other alternatives. However, since society cannot live on the edge of fundamental change forever, this phase must come to an end. Once the new technology is accepted and fundamental innovation stops, the old economy, with all the familiar rules of behavior, returns. The victorious producer becomes the pusher for a society already addicted to his products and prices will grow again as dictated by the law of supply and demand.