23 February 2009
 
Network Centric Warfare


(Network Centric Powerpoint)
 
I stayed up too late at Big Pink to be rested and not long enough to be satisfied. The reason this time was not trying to party past the inexorable present, but to watch the proceedings of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts. I did my best to ignore it, since I can safely say that I have seen none of the fine works honored by the Academy.
 
I use the Oscars as a template for what movies I might want to attempt to watch on DVD this year, assuming the power stays on and NetFlix continues to deliver.
 
There were some surprises, I gather. One I had not anticipated, and the other I did. I refer of course to the triumph of the dead, the Oscar for best Actor and best supporting actor, male.
 
I think it is safe to say that the brief career and remarkable energy of Mr. Heath Leger in his portrayal of a sociopathic comic-book character was not unexpected. He had taken some risks in his short time in the footlights, including the role of a cowboy who also happened to have strong feelings for another Wyoming cowpoke in the unsettling film Brokeback Mountain.
 
I have not seen it, nor have I seen Dark Knight, the film in which his last role as the Joker was rewarded with the golden statuette.
 
It is weird. Heath was born in West Australia just a few months after our carrier group made a spectacular port visit to Fremantle, the port city that connects Perth on the Swan River to the wider world. No possible connection. Just weird.
 
With that, though, I should have known that the network of voters that make up the Academy would have honored another dead man, this one played by the very much alive Sean Penn, the indefatigable and trail-blazing gay activist and martyr Harvey Milk.
 
I should have known it was a lock for Mr. Penn, since the passage of Prop 8, which rejected gay marriage, offended the sensibility of many in the Golden State. The Oscars are sometimes conflict in a social sphere.
 
The controversy appears to be the last relic of the culture wars, and the network of the Academy apparently used their bully pulpit to reward a fine performance while applying a stinging rebuke to the voters of the other, larger network of networks that passed the proposition.
 
It is all about networks, after all, all the things we do and all the things we know and feel.
 
The Department of Defense first began to address the concept in the early 1990s. Colin Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and strode like a titan through the Pentagon. His commanding presence cowed the civilians who were placed above him in the hierarchy. Having turned back the threat of integrating overtly homosexual personnel, the Department had settled into the long straitjacket of flat-to-declining resources of the post-Cold War period.
 
In the words of New Zealand Physicist Ernest Rutherford, "Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It is time to start thinking."
 
Thinking cost nothing, since we were all on the payroll anyway. The building was alive with schemes for doing more things with less. Legendary defense mystic Admiral Bobby Ownes was Powell’s Deputy, and he had a model of a great floating island of steel that could be towed and anchored where necessary, replacing he much more expensive aircraft carrier.
 
One of his acolytes was the cerebral Navy pilot Art Cebrowski, who tinkered with Owen’s thoughts on the system-of-systems, added in the seminal thinking of Air Force Colonel John Boyd, and emerged bearing the torch of Network Centric Warfare.
 
There being no way to continue to do the same thing with limited resources, the institution adopted the torch, and began to think. Or at least generate PowerPoint slides in an awesome manner.
 
It is a frightening thing when an institution as big and ponderous as the Department beings to do that, and result was the predictable gobblety-gook of programs and cliché that no one really understood, except in the most simple of terms.
 
Suffice it to say, in brief, that on the platform of the DARPANet (which became the Web) a new generation of intelligence sensors, integrated to command and control systems, and coupled with precision weapons permitted an agility on the field that made the German Blitzkrieg seem static.
 
I liked the way Admiral Cebrowski said it in his speeches. “When you build a campus, wait for a year before you put in the sidewalks. Wait and see where the people actually walk, and then put them in.”
 
The man was a genius, perhaps our first Sufi Flag officer. Predator drones hovering invisible over the battlefield, and it’s armed descendents operating now over the Northwest Frontier are part of the concept, and of the Global Information Grid on which the Department depends. Of course, with this dramatic technical advance comes reliance upon it, and the new vulnerability of the military machine in cyber-space.
 
I had a chance to thank Admiral Cebrowski before his passing, and I am glad I did.
 
But the bad guys have their networks, too, both old and new. They leverage all the tools that have proliferated on the Web. Not just global instantaneous communications, not just satellite imagery of potential targets, but personal information and near real-time situational awareness. The Mumbai murderers were Twittering away, inside the information cycle of their prospective victims, supported by information stream a world away from India.
 
I had intended to get further on this today, but regrettably this appears to be a break point. Human networks are the context in which our enemies thrive, and they are connected and entwined in ways that counter the massive effort to apply the power of the system of systems across the spectrum of conflict.
 
What the Defense mystics were trying to get to was a place of understanding, a high perch of perfect knowledge from which soft and hard power could reach out to shape the battlefield and act decisively.
 
In large measure we have done that. But in so doing, we have given the Bad Guys the same tools. Not as sophisticated, perhaps, but capable of doing us in as effectively as David’s sling did Goliath.
 
They key to understanding is the people, which is what Admiral Cebrwoski was getting at, and the way they organize and behave. Like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, or the people who want to sell your children drugs, or kill you in your bed.
 
There is a story in that.
 
Tomorrow: Human Terrain
 

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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