Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

style=”font-weight: normal;”>The front page of today’s
New York Times (Nov 13, 2004) describes a feeding frenzy among big high
tech companies and defense contractors to build a “world wide web for
the wars of the future.”  The new system is called the Global Information Grid and aims to implement a concept called “network-centric warfare.”

Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation,
the nation’s biggest military contractor, said he envisioned a “highly
secure Internet in which military and intelligence activities are
fused,” shaping 21st-century warfare in the way that nuclear weapons
shaped the cold war. Every member of the military would have “a picture
of the battle space, a God’s-eye view,” he said. “And that’s real
power.”

Hmmm. I’m fairly sure this is not how God sees a war–but that is a conversation for another time. 

Where did this idea of the Global Information Grid and its
philosophical basis, “network-centric warfare” come from?  From
applying high tech industry structure ideas to warmaking.  What
ideas? “Business ecosystems,” an idea I pioneered in the early 1990s,
figures prominently.  This gives me pause.  Part of me is
proud of this influence but, as I will explain later, another deeper
part shudders at the megalomania that appears to be stalking the
program described in the Times.

In 1998 Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski, U.S. Navy, and John J. Garstka wrote a seminal article called Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future.  Here is an excerpt from their discussion:

Network-centric warfare and all of its associated
revolutions in military affairs grow out of and
draw their power from the fundamental changes
in American society. These changes have been dominated
by the co-evolution of economics, information
technology, and business processes and organizations,
and they are linked by three themes:

• The shift in focus from the platform to the
  network
• The shift from viewing actors as independent
  to viewing them as part of a continuously adapting
  ecosystem
• The importance of making strategic choices
  to adapt or even survive in such changing ecosystems³

In 2000 I was contacted by the authors of “Network Centric Warfare:
Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority,” a book published by
the CCRP–which I found out is the US Department of Defense C41SR
Cooperative Research Program which “has the mission of improving DoD’s
understanding of the national security implications of the Information
Age.

This book introduced the concept of the “warfighting ecosystem” based on the ideas of business ecosystems,

What you read here are concepts taken from ecosystems, swarms, emergent
order and information advantages applied to the coordination of people
in war.  In a sense. the model is Open Source warfare, where the
troops find ways to plug in and collaborate from the bottom-up as well
as from the top-down.

Now, I must say that I think that much of this is very good thinking.
If one is going to make war, risk and take many lives for presumably a
just cause, it is important to be as effective as possible in
organization and communication and leadership.  And I do believe
that many of the network-centric strategic ideas that have been
developed in the high tech world are highly generalizable.

On the other hand, the current instantiation of these ideas, at least
as reported in the New York Times, seems to take these ideas far from
their original spirit–and leaves me quite concerned.  In the book
Network Centric Warfare the authors were cautious in their
claims.  They seem to care more about knowledge, learning, and
leadership paradigms than large procurement programs.  By
contrast, the Times article describes the current situation as follows:

Military contractors – and information-technology creators not
usually associated with weapons systems – formed a consortium to
develop the war net on Sept. 28. The group includes an A-list of
military contractors and technology powerhouses: Boeing; Cisco Systems; Factiva, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters; General Dynamics; Hewlett-Packard; Honeywell; I.B.M.; Lockheed Martin; Microsoft; Northrop Grumman; Oracle; Raytheon; and Sun Microsystems. They are working to weave weapons, intelligence and communications into a seamless web.

The Pentagon has tried this twice before.

Its
Worldwide Military Command and Control System, built in the 1960’s,
often failed in crises. A $25 billion successor, Milstar, was completed
in 2003 after two decades of work. Pentagon officials say it is already
outdated: more switchboard than server, more dial-up than broadband, it
cannot support 21st-century technology.

The Pentagon’s
scientists and engineers, starting four decades ago, invented the
systems that became the Internet. Throughout the cold war, their
computer power ran far ahead of the rest of the world.

Then the
world eclipsed them. The nation’s military and intelligence services
started falling behind when the Internet exploded onto the commercial
scene a decade ago. The war net is “an attempt to catch up,” Mr. Cerf
said.

It has been slowly evolving for at least six years. In
1999, Pentagon officials told Congress that “this monumental task will
span a quarter-century or more.” This year, the vision gained focus,
and Pentagon officials started explaining it in some detail to Congress.

Its scope was described in July by the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog agency for Congress.

Many
new multibillion-dollar weapons and satellites are “critically
dependent on the future network,” the agency reported. “Despite
enormous challenges and risks – many of which have not been
successfully overcome in smaller-scale efforts” like missile defense,
“the Pentagon is depending on the GIG to enable a fundamental
transformation in the way military operations are conducted.”

According
to Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon’s Office of Force
Transformation, “What we are really talking about is a new theory of
war.”

Linton Wells II, the chief information officer at the
Defense Department, said net-centric principles were becoming “the
center of gravity” for war planners.

While our old friend Admiral Cebrowski is talking about ideas and
theories and paradigm shifts, others seem focused on the billions of
dollars of technology to be purchased.

I’m concerned that the good ideas may get lost in the massive implementation..

More profoundly, I am concerned that in making this idea such a
centerpiece of military thinking,  we are missing the important
lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan and, yes, even Sudan: Waging war is
hard–waging peace harder yet.  Making war is difficult, but
preventing war or establishing viable societies after war sometimes
seems almost impossible.  This is a main point of Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map, for example–which describes work also led by Admiral Cebrowski.

As I have written before, and will again, I’d like to see much much
more effort go into “network-centric peacemaking.”  If Barnett is
correct, we need about ten times the effort on peacemaking and nation
building that we put into war-making.  Let’s get started.

—————————————-

Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War

 By TIM WEINER

Published: November 13, 2004

he Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military’s world wide web for the wars of the future.

The
goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of
all foreign enemies and threats – “a God’s-eye view” of battle.

This
“Internet in the sky,” Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force,
told Congress, would allow “marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in
the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery”
from a spy satellite, and “get it downloaded within seconds.”

The
Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information Grid, or GIG.
Conceived six years ago, its first connections were laid six weeks ago.
It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build
the new war net and its components.

Skeptics say the costs are staggering and the technological hurdles huge.

Vint
Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and a Pentagon consultant on
the war net, said he wondered if the military’s dream was realistic. “I
want to make sure what we realize is vision and not hallucination,” Mr.
Cerf said.

“This is sort of like Star Wars, where the policy
was, ‘Let’s go out and build this system,’ and technology lagged far
behind,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with having ambitious goals.
You just need to temper them with physics and reality.”

Advocates
say networked computers will be the most powerful weapon in the
American arsenal. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence and soldiers in a
global network – what they call net-centric warfare – will, they say,
change the military in the way the Internet has changed business and
culture.

“Possibly the single most transforming thing in our
force,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, “will not be a
weapons system, but a set of interconnections.”

The American
military, built to fight nations and armies, now faces stateless
enemies without jets, tanks, ships or central headquarters. Sending
secret intelligence and stratagems instantly to soldiers in battle
would, in theory, make the military a faster, fiercer force against a
faceless foe.

Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation,
the nation’s biggest military contractor, said he envisioned a “highly
secure Internet in which military and intelligence activities are
fused,” shaping 21st-century warfare in the way that nuclear weapons
shaped the cold war.

Every member of the military would have “a picture of the battle space, a God’s-eye view,” he said. “And that’s real power.”

Pentagon
traditionalists, however, ask if net-centric warfare is nothing more
than an expensive fad. They point to the street fighting in Falluja and
Baghdad, saying firepower and armor still mean more than fiber optic
cables and wireless connections.

But the biggest challenge in
building a war net may be the military bureaucracy. For decades, the
Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have built their own weapons and
traditions. A network, advocates say, would cut through those old ways.

The
ideals of this new warfare are driving many of the Pentagon’s spending
plans for the next 10 to 15 years. Some costs are secret, but billions
have already been spent.

Providing the connections to run the
war net will cost at least $24 billion over the next five years – more
than the cost, in today’s dollars, of the Manhattan Project to build
the atomic bomb. Beyond that, encrypting data will be a $5 billion
project.

Hundreds of thousands of new radios are likely to cost
$25 billion. Satellite systems for intelligence, surveillance,
reconnaissance and communications will be tens of billions more. The
Army’s program for a war net alone has a $120 billion price tag.

Over
all, Pentagon documents suggest, $200 billion or more may go for the
war net’s hardware and software in the next decade or so. “The question
is one of cost and technology,” said John Hamre, a former deputy
secretary of defense, now president of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington.

“We want to know all things
at all times everywhere in the world? Fine,” Mr. Hamre said. “Do we
know what this staring, all-seeing eye is that we’re going to put in
space is? Hell, no.”