Network Centric Warfare - A Wizard's New Command and Control Toolbox

Summary of the article in RSAWSPJ no 6 2001 by Svante Bergh, Håkan Lans and Christer Lidström.

The article is the annual study 2001 of the Military Technical Section of The Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences, presented to the Academy on 11th September 2001.

Information technology, IT, is developing at an ever-increasing rate. This makes it cost-effective to shift to, and to communicate and operate via networks. This is exactly what is now taking place in the civilian sector, and it is bound to strongly in-fluence military organisations as well.

The Swedish Armed Forces will probably use a logically closed intranet which will lease capacity from civilian networks.

Resources developed within the Armed Forces and mainly built on civilian technologies will reinforce already ex-isting computer networks. These technologies can be base stations for 3G networks. They can also be WLANs - wireless local area networks with ranges of approximately 400 metres - or Bluetooth networks with ranges of approximately 10 metres. WLANs can be used at a staff site or within a smaller unit. Bluetooths are locally confined and primarily useful in armoured vehicles, ships and the like. Even individual soldiers can set up miniature networks with appropriate sensors to achieve improved combat effectiveness.

One of the most important advantages of having access to a variety of networks is the added capability of being able to use the information, or the combined effects culled from these various systems.

Network Centric Warfare means utilising the inherent capabilities of systems in combination with other mutiple services available on the Net.

Existing technology gives us the possibility to cooperate and to achieve interoperability with our own government agencies as well as with defence establishments of other countries.

In future, civilian technology will contain a high level of security which can be reinforced if and when needed.

This annual study shows the enormous potential that exists in adopting Network Centric Warfare. The concept is primarily based on understanding and adopting at an early stage what will, in the event anyhow, come about as an imperative necessity through developments in the civilian field. Since one of the basic requirements for future warfare will be to gain and retain the upper hand, not least as far as command and control is concerned, it is vital to have the operational edge on the enemy, based on information superiority. Moving in this direction is therefore not an alternative to disapprove of or deny ourselves.

The need for Network Centric Warfare capability is by no means an exclusive Armed Forces affair. It is of equal importance to the rest of Sweden’s Total Defence.