Overview

Today, Western nations stand at a crossroads on their way to national security. One road would continue to prepare them for a war with a peer competitor, the other would begin to prepare them for war with a much weaker, but not thereby less determined, enemy. The first road, is like a straight highway much traveled on, standing clear before one’s feet as far as the eye can see. The second is like a country road less traveled by, quickly disappearing into the thick underbrush blocking the view.

The existence of this crossroads raises the important question as to which of these two paths nations should choose to follow. For, as the American poet Robert Frost once famously said, choosing a path at a crossroads could make all the difference:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


Some ten years ago, western nations took the first tentative steps down the road less traveled by when they began preparing themselves for asymmetric war, by which they meant warfare in which their enemy, unable to confront them directly on their own terms, would have focused instead on exploiting the weaknesses in their current military posture. Traveling this road, the author argues, would therefore have eventually meant developing a totally new set of rules governing the use of force in a world characterized by failed states, rampant terrorism, and easy availability of highly destructive weapons. A profound re-assessment of the strategic plans which guide the western nations today would thus have been needed, as well as a thorough re-examination of their tactical systems with an eye toward identifying and eliminating the exploitable vulnerabilities in their capability.

But, as the author points out in this book, something happened between then and now. Rather than follow through with their original intention of preparing for asymmetric war, western nations have suddenly decided to do exactly the opposite: they are preparing for a symmetric war of the kind the West fought during the Cold War against the Soviet block. As if the enemy had not really changed at all, western military establishments are planning to keep current military systems doing exactly what they have been doing throughout the Cold War, but do so even better with the help of the recently developed Internet technology. In a searingly critical appraisal of the consequences of this wrong-headed decision to follow the road much traveled on, the author exhaustively proves that this choice will, as the poet said, make all the difference.

To avoid those consequences, the book makes an impassioned appeal for a return to the sanity of the original determination to follow the road less traveled by. Once he has made the case for following the road less traveled by, the author takes us down that road. He describes in some detail the scenery one would encounter along the way, highlighting where and how information technology fits in that scenery, and then prefigures the relative security that would await at the end of that road.

Preface

This book may never have been written had it not been for the sudden emergence in the United States of the Network Centric doctrine of war, which would rest all current military thinking upon the use of information technology. This increasingly popular doctrine is so fundamentally out of sorts with the historical pattern of how western powers acquire military technology that it became necessary to subject its tenets to a thorough scrutiny. The fact that, despite the absence of any serious attempt on the part of the proponents to justify the claims of this doctrine, money is already being spent to implement its recommendations both here in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom, made the writing of this book a matter of some urgency as well.

Written as it was to do battle with a prevailing movement, the book can not help its polemical tone. Behind that tone, however, there lies a non-polemical attempt at understanding the proper military role of information technology. That attempt is guided by two general principles: that military technology must serve national security and that systems analysis is the best way of ensuring that it does. Consequently, this book has acquired a rather strange voice; it mixes historical, cultural, and political conversation with the language of mathematics to determine the ways in which information technology could be of service to the security of a western nation confronting the novel challenges of the post Cold-War international environment.

If, despite its unconventional voice, this book succeeds in generating a healthy debate about the strengths and weaknesses of the prevailing doctrine, it will have amply fulfilled the purpose for which the author has undertaken the effort of writing it. For, absent such a debate, how is the defense community to ever know whether the siren call of Network Centrism, with its promises of “shock and awe”, is not sending us down the road to national insecurity?

Alfred Kaufman
Alexandria
Virginia
February 2004

Table of contents

CONTENTS
1	INTRODUCTION	1
2	CONTROLLING TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION IN THE MILITARY	7
2.1	Command Technology	7
2.2	The Prussian General Staff	11
2.3	The American Practice of Systems Analysis	12
3	THE HEYDAYS OF SYSTEMS ANALYSIS	15
3.1	The Cold War Planning Scenario	15
3.2	What is Systems Analysis?	17
3.3	The Art of Systems Analysis	18
3.4	What is a Fair Price to Pay for a Weapon System?	26
3.5	Acquisition of the War Machine	31
4	THE DECLINE AND FALL OF SYSTEMS ANALYSIS	35
4.1	The Cold War Scenario Ceases to be Predictive	35
4.2	Modeling and Simulation Replaces Systems Analysis	36
4.3	The Birth of Network Centric Warfare	40
4.4	Network Centric Warfare and Command Technology	53
5	A CRITICAL VIEW OF NETWORK CENTRIC WARFARE	57
5.1	The Economic Provenance of Network Centric Warfare	58
5.2	Network Centrism: Network Centric Warfare as Ideology	60
5.3	The Centrality of Information Superiority	62
5.4	Retiring the Platform-Centric War Machine	63
5.5	The Self-Defeating Character of Network Centrism	64
6	THE DESTRUCTIVE CONSEQUENCES OF NETWORK CENTRISM	69
6.1	A Relentless Drive for Innovation May Hurt Security	69
6.2	Wishful Thinking Becomes Strategy	72
6.3	Bureaucracy Takes Over the Dynamics of War	73
6.4	Command and Control Loses Its Human Dimension	76
6.5	Machines Replace Humans	77
6.6	Overwhelming Power Disdains War Diplomacy	79
7	BRINGING COMMAND TECHNOLOGY UNDER CONTROL AGAIN	81
7.1	Replacing Scenario with a New Planning Paradigm	81
7.2	Reinstating the Primacy of Systems Analysis	95
8	THE LIMITS OF NETWORK CENTRISM	101
8.1	The Limits Imposed by Enemy Deception	103
8.2	The Limits Imposed by Enemy Evasion While Under Attack	108
8.3	The Limits Imposed by the Human Character	111
8.4	Buying Individual Human Proficiency	119
8.5	The Man-Machine Debate	124
9	NETWORK CENTRISM CHASTENED	127
9.1	Underestimating Our Enemy	127
9.2	Overestimating Ourselves	129
9.3	Reorienting the Acquisition Process	130
10	CONCLUSION	133
	APPENDICES
A	THE RETENTION MODEL	137
B	THE AUTOMATION MODEL	139
	INDEX	143

Sample Chapter

Download a sample chapter of Curbing Innovation: How Command Technology Limits Network Centric Warfare (PDF)