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OSAC Item (Printer Friendly Version)
from Business Week on Wednesday, January 08, 2003

The Pentagon's aim is to meld weapons systems and people into a whole, called network-centric warfare, that's greater than the sum of its parts On Nov. 21, U.S. Air Force officials got their hands on the ultimate global video game. Thanks to a system upgrade by defense contractor Lockheed Martin (LMT ), flyboys (and girls) could hop onto a special Air Force network from any PC equipped with a Web browser and special military encryption and authentication software. Once on this network, they could call for air strikes, direct reconaissance planes, or plot the movements of the most powerful flying force on Earth -- all from their laptop in a café (or, more likely, at a secured facility). "All you need is Internet Explorer," says Doug Barton, the director of technology for Lockheed Martin Mission Systems, based in Gaithersburg, Md.

This technology has a typically clunky military name -- the TBMCS C2 Air Combat system -- that belies its power. In fact, it isn't a game at all, but the latest in a series of developments that's moving the Air Force into the era of so-called network-centric warfare, or NCW. The goal is to weave weapons systems and people into a network whose whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.

Among other things, the system should make it easier to track and attack military targets, and provide a command structure that's more resilient and damage-proof. "If you network a [military] force, it can do things at a speed that is unimaginable," says John Garstka, director of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation and a leading theorist in the area.

BEST-CASE SCENARIO. The military's resounding success in Afghanistan, where units from different branches of the service worked in unprecedented unison, has led to a consensus that NCW is the way of the future. "If 20 years ago you had predicted to Army, Navy, and Air Force people the degree to which they would be working together, they would have said no," says Ivan Oelrich, a senior research associate at the Federation of American Scientists. He calls the latest developments "an impressive change in institutional culture."

Now comes the hard part. While the U.S. was able to flatten the Taliban with a minimum of casualties and less damage to civilians than occurred during the Vietnam War, for example, Afghanistan was in many ways a best-case scenario. The Taliban could muster few if any defenses and weren't well trained, equipped, or motivated. And the barren terrain of Afghanistan made communications with satellites and between U.S. units less complex than in a jungle or urban environment.

Even so, many U.S. commanders bumped up against some discouraging limitations of NCW, 2002-style. Stories of Special Forces troopers calling in air strikes with laser pointers made the media, but behind the scenes commanders had to queue up for satellite uplinks and bickering broke out over who would get access to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with names like Global Hawks or Predators. Many officers complained of bandwidth limitations that crimped their ability to use newly networked systems.

"The further you get out in a deployed scenario, the less bandwidth is available," says Jerry DeMuro, president of the command, control, communication, and computer system (C4) unit at defense contractor General Dynamics (GD ). "It's a precious commodity."

INFORMATION WINS. Another danger is becoming lulled into thinking that, despite such glitches, the U.S. military is invincible. "How does all this function in the future when we don't have absolute dominance?" wonders the FAS's Oelrich. "That's something the military hasn't thought through at all." Nor has it even contemplated the effort and time required to remake a hierarchial, hidebound organization so that it can function with a flat management structure, ad-hoc collaboration, and on-the-fly decision-making.

Nonetheless, one way or another NCW is coming, for one simple reason: From the dawn of organized conflict, military strategists have used communications and information to beat the enemy. The ancient Greeks dispatched runners over long distances to deliver military messages, the most fabled of whom, Phillipides died on the plain of Marathon. European infantries used drummers to communicate common battle orders to solidiers fighting together who didn't speak the same language.

NCW sprang from a need, dramatized in World War II and Vietnam, to use information technology to create a more lethal fighting force, as well as to to avoid casualties from friendly fire. Initial efforts follow what has become a familiar path for new technologies: Each branch of the service went its own way, creating a system that was incompatible with that of the other branches.

TRIED AND TRUE SYNTAX. "If I have 14 systems, I have to build 14 interfaces," says Margaret Myers, deputy chief information officer for the Defense Dept. "Then the next guy comes along and builds a new system, and then he or she has to build 15 interfaces. That's expensive, and those interfaces don't always work." The commander of a joint task force comprising sea, air, and land power, and spanning multiple service branches -- the unit used to fight most battles today -- must contend with 400 combat systems, most of which are still incompatible, Myers says.

In the mid 1990s Defense found a solution in the form of the Internet -- a slightly ironic development in that Pentagon research money helped fund the original Internet, ARPANET, which was a small project designed to create easy ways for researchers to communicate electronically that would be hard to disrupt. What Defense wants NCW to use isn't so much the public Internet itself, though a significant percentage of its traffic travels on the Web, but rather the technology behind the Net, the universal syntax called TCP-IP that allows Apple desktops to talk easily with Unix servers, Microsoft-based PCs, and Linux-powered laptops.

Adapting specialized computer battle systems built on proprietary technology to work with standard Internet protocols entails a lot of special programming that, to take one example, ties weapon systems more closely into the global positioning satellite network that provides the coordinates of any location on earth. Add to the mix the growing sophistication and dependability of wireless communications, and the Pentagon not only can guide bombs and missiles with GPS tracking systems but also change their trajectory in mid-flight.

OVERSOLD ABILITIES? Suddenly, Navy battle groups of dozens of ships and aircraft can share a radar picture, plus information on everything from incoming low-flying cruise missles to small boats bearing suicide bombers. The Navy is deploying that capability as part of Raytheon's (RTN ) Cooperative Engagement Capability project, a $1 billion system that's just now being rolling out.

The progress has been impressive, though observers sound cautionary notes. "The flaw in this is that none of what's being advertised can be done on the stated timelines," says Frank Lanza, CEO of L-3 Communictions (LLL ), which builds a wide variety of communication and networking systems for the military. "The danger is that people believe it can be done." Lanza's fear is that a lot of the new NCW equipment and its capabilities are being oversold in their current incarnation.

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