Backporch Beer - WE'VE CLOSED! THANKS FOR YOUR PATRONAGE!

Network Centric Warfare

Thanks to Wired for this link.

Found an article that tracks closely with my experiences in the recent war. The Navy is indeed embracing secure websites.

The beauty of this change is that it’s being driven from the deckplates (lowest levels) up. While I was at Sub School, we were handed a couple million dollars of networked classrooms and links to the SIPRNET and told to ‘Make it work.’ No serious oversight as long as we were still turning out well-educated submariners. We also used the capability to feed training to subs at sea doing real-world work. The shift to networked warfare was extremely pronounced when I went back to sea for the Iraqi war. Instead of standing a watch with a secure radio handset pressed to my ear, I was sitting in a chat room, passing out links to applicable sites, and making sure that information was in place before it was needed.

Microsoft is far from out, though. Much of the information on the secure websites is tied up as powerpoints, and sharing Outlook folders is how many organizations track items.

The success in applying this technology boils down to two things, IMO:

First, the Navy spent money like only the government can in deciding to wire the shit out of the fleet. From the time I got to the sub force in 1996 until the time I left active duty, we went from having maybe two computers for a sub’s wardroom and all paperwork submitted either on hardcopy or via record message traffic to having two LAN’s on board (one unclass, one secure) and a bunch of e-mail traffic. This was paralleled throughout the fleet and shore activities. Persistient application of technology is one of the few ways to drive adoption.

Second, the Navy and the rest of the Armed Forces in general are youth driven organizations. Average age is something like 20. Most of the officer corps start as 22 or 23 year old college graduates. So they’re in general more clued in to current technology. These young 20-somethings are also the front-line decision makers, and anything that makes it easier for them to get and share data on both mundane crap like keeping ships sailing and aircraft flying is going to get used. Another driver is the ability to clue their circle of friends into what they’re doing instantly with a quick e-mail or web link. Much of the higher echelons are only recently realizing how embedded the new tools have become, and are giving a lot of latitude to their Lieutenants to create new ways of conducting war.

My personal feeling, though, is that the quantum leaps in information sharing are going to rapidly grind to a halt. First, there are way too many senior officers who are going to be looking for a Fitness Report bullet that goes something like “Created a system for tracking changes to the unit’s website”, or “Created Chat Standard Operating Procedure for conducting Interdiction and Warning Operations.” The Cluetrain Manifesto (Yeah, it was way overhyped, but IMHO it hasn’t been read closely enough) did a great job of capturing the ad hoc nature of networked technology. One of its tenets was “#47 – While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to “improve” or control these networked conversations. “

Second, inevitably and tragically, there will be an accident due to bad information passed via a chat room or over a web page. While the same accident might have happened using traditional communications methods such as voice channels or legacy data links, network-centric warfare will be blamed. There will be some personnel whose careers will be saved, but this will result in stricter controls being placed on information published on the SIPRNET. The result will be infrastructure which is as rigid as the channels which has replaced.