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Overview of Study Results
1.1 MISSION EFFECTIVENESS: WHAT IS REQUIRED
1.1.1 Joint Vision 2010
In one way or another all military operations will be joint. That is, systems and forces from all the Services and from National agencies will contribute to the U.S. Armed Forces' operations in ways that vary with the circumstances. Developed in the past few years by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 20101 envisions how the Armed Forces will channel the vitality and innovation of the nation's people and use the leverage offered by advancing technology to achieve unprecedented levels of power, timeliness, and decisiveness in joint operations and warfighting. The Navy and Marine Corps have also developed conceptual descriptions of their own future warfighting strategies—“Forward…From the Sea”2 and “Operational Maneuver From the Sea”3 —that have themes in common with Joint Vision 2010. Most importantly, all of these concepts have recog-
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Shalikashvili, GEN John M., USA. 1997. Joint Vision 2010, Joint Chiefs of Staff, The Pentagon, Washington, D.C. |
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Department of the Navy. 1997. “Forward…From the Sea,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. |
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Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps. 1996. “Operational Maneuver From the Sea,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., January 4. |
nized the fundamental role that information superiority will play in the forces' ability to prevail over adversaries.4
Focusing on achieving dominance across the range of military operations through the application of new operational concepts, Joint Vision 2010 provides a joint framework of doctrine and programs within which the Services can develop their unique capabilities as they prepare to meet an uncertain and challenging future. The scope and complexity of the challenges and the capabilities required to meet them were projected in a recent Naval Studies Board report (the TFNF—Technology for Future Naval Forces—study;5 see Box 1.1), an effort from which this current study follows naturally.
1.1.2 Network-Centric Operations
The implications of Joint Vision 2010, future naval operational concepts, and the spread of advanced technology and commercial information systems worldwide make it inevitable that joint forces, and particularly forward-deployed naval forces, must move toward network-centric operations. The committee defines such operations as follows: Network-centric operations (NCO) are military operations that exploit state-of-the-art information and networking technology to integrate widely dispersed human decision makers, situational and targeting sensors, and forces and weapons into a highly adaptive, comprehensive system to achieve unprecedented mission effectiveness.
Forward deployment of naval forces that may be widely dispersed geographically, the use of fire and forces massed rapidly from great distances at decisive locations and times, and the dispersed, highly mobile operations of Marine Corps units are examples of future tasks that will place significant demands on networked forces and information superiority. Future naval forces must be supported by a shared, consolidated picture of the situation, distributed collaborative planning, and battle-space control capabilities. In addition, the forces must be capable of coordinating and massing for land attacks and of employing multisensor networking and targeting for undersea warfare and missile defense.
In network-centric operations, the supporting information infrastructure, ideally, will deliver the right information to the right place at the right time to achieve the force objectives. Also, although rules of engagement (ROEs) are
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Joint Vision 2010 (p. 16) defines information superiority as “the capability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or denying an adversary's ability to do the same.” Information superiority will therefore require “both offensive and defensive information warfare” capabilities. |
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Naval Studies Board, National Research Council. 1997. Technology for the United States Navy and Marine Corps, 2000-2035: Becoming a 21st-Century Force, 9 volumes, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C. |
usually determined politically and morally, accurate information delivered rapidly to a commander may affect how ROEs are applied, for example, by providing input to decisions for preemptive attack in primarily defensive situations. Network-centric operations must also ensure that when forces move and weapons are delivered according to the information furnished, they arrive at the right places and times to achieve the force objectives. Thus, the command relationships, the information systems and networks, implementations of ROEs, and the combat forces themselves must all evolve toward network-centric operations together.
The trend toward network-centric operations is inevitable. There are many reasons why this is so. One reason is the pull of opportunity: The anticipated effectiveness of joint, networked forces is compelling. A second is the push of necessity: Threats are becoming more diverse, subtle, and capable. If they are to be discerned, fathomed, and effectively countered in timely fashion, increasingly complex information gathering and exploitation will be required. Also, the diversity and geographic spread of potential threats and operations, many of which will occur simultaneously or nearly so, demand that forces of any size be used to their maximum effectiveness and efficiency. Another reason derives from the relentless advance of U.S. and foreign technology in both the civilian and military spheres: There will be no other way for U.S. forces to develop. Only a force that is attuned to and capable of harnessing the power of the information technology that drives modern society will be able to operate effectively to protect that society.
The naval forces are already moving toward network-centric operations. Joint task force commands afloat are being established to direct ongoing operations and are the subjects of fleet battle experiments. Elements of network-centric forces and operations are both in place and in the making, in the Aegis system and its extensions to theater missile defense, and in the cooperative engagement capability (CEC) for fleet defense against cruise missiles and its shoreward extensions. 6 The Navy's information technology thrust is becoming
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It is remarkable that in World War II the U.S. Navy's Tenth Fleet exercised network-centric antisubmarine warfare (ASW) operations in the Battle of the Atlantic against German submarines, characterized by Morison as “. . . a contest between systems of information . . .” (as quoted by Cohen, Eliot A., and John Gooch. 1990. Military Misfortunes; The Anatomy of Failure in War, The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan, Inc., New York and Collier Macmillan Publishers, London, p. 75). The Tenth Fleet integrated information from distant direction-finding fixes with data from local high-frequency direction finder and radar contact from forces in the action area with decrypted messages and other intelligence from vessels attacked, and with the help of a strong operational analysis group directed the coordinated efforts of warships, aircraft, and convoy commanders, with time delays from initial detection to action orders of minutes to hours. The Tenth Fleet also shared its operational picture and coordinated actions with the British in charge of the Eastern Atlantic ASW operations and conducted information warfare in the form of psychological warfare messages directed specifically to the enemy submarines at sea. |
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Box 1.1 Future Naval Operations Technology for the United States Navy and Marines Corps, 2000-2035 (the TFNF study)1 projected that future naval forces would continue to be required to perform tasks such as the following (Vol. 1, Overview, p. 3):
These tasks are not new for the naval forces and have changed little over the decades. However, advanced technology is now spreading around the world, and burgeoning military capabilities elsewhere will, in hostile hands, pose threats to U.S. naval force operations. The most serious are as follows (pp. 4-5):
Future naval forces must be designed to meet these threats while maintaining the forward presence and operational flexibility that have characterized U.S. naval forces throughout history. This capability must be achieved in a world of ever advancing technology (particularly information technology) available globally through the commercial sector and sales to foreign military users. The TFNF study described the characteristics of future naval force operations as follows (p. 6):
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evident in the fleet and its support operations. During the Cold War, networked antisubmarine warfare (ASW) systems were devised to overcome the Soviet submarine threat. As the TFNF report points out, networked operations will become necessary to achieve an effective defense against quiet submarines in the littoral environment and against mine warfare; effective fleet fire and logistic support of Marines ashore in Operational Maneuver From the Sea (OMFTS); and effective protection against growing air defense capabilities of potential adversaries that will demand engagements at very long ranges.
Today, however, all of these network-centric operations and capabilities, existing and under development, are evolving in an essentially fragmented and stand-alone manner. The focus is still on the subsystems or components of the total naval force combat system, and they are not yet fully coordinated with one another. It has become clear that unless networked naval forces are treated as a total system, a great deal of money will be wasted and opportunities to enhance warfighting capabilities will be lost. Beyond optimizing individual sensors, weapons, and command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) systems, it is essential to achieve overall optimization of the total system of networked combat assets, including the information that ties them all together and makes them fully effective.
Network-centric operations with fully networked forces will provide the significant advances demanded for success in future warfighting and in countering the capabilities of future adversaries. They will enable better and faster battlespace decisions, providing time and direction for rapid, integrated execution of tasks with flexible use of both dispersed and concentrated (and other joint and combined) assets. At the same time, however, network-centric operations will present significant new vulnerabilities that must be actively managed through the application of technology and doctrine. Both aspects of network-centric operations are treated in this report.
1.1.3 Approach and Emphasis in This Report
This report describes the operational concepts, command and control relationships, and information systems architecture necessary to support the networked naval forces. Many requirements for sensor and weapon systems assets in the future systems are also discussed, as is information assurance, which is critical to achieving true information superiority.
In keeping with the definition of network-centric operations given above, the committee considered more than just the design of information and communication systems, a critically important topic in itself. Since the point of network-centric operations is to empower the entire naval force to maximize the effectiveness of its operations, this examination of network-centric operations has been extended to include the entire naval force system encompassed by the committee's
