Netcentric Warfare Revisited (NCW): It's Origin and Its Future ... Revisited
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Authors
Gunderson, Chris
Subjects
Advisors
Date of Issue
2009-09-01
Date
Publisher
Language
Abstract
It has been a decade since Cebrowski and Gartska, and Alberts, Gartska,
and Klein published their watershed Network‐Centric Warfare (NCW)
Naval Institute Proceedings article and book, respectively. Through the
lens of hindsight, this paper examines how their theories and predictions
have held up. The authors find that the tenets of NCW have proven
valid. Despite pro forma policy to the contrary, the US Defense
community has substantially eschewed Cebrowski et al. in actual
practice. Ironically, Al Qaeda has implemented the principles and
achieved an advantage from them. Meanwhile, lessons learned in the
21st Century suggest two subtle improvements to the original NCW
theory. First, success at NCW requires instantiating “smart push” of
valued information at the right time (VIRT) as a key tactic. Second,
success at NCW requires rapid, agile, “network‐centric” acquisition
conducted literally within the commercial ecosystem of the World Wide
Web.
Type
Article
Description
Chris Gunderson is a Research Associate at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is the principal investigator of the Open Enterprise Information System (OEIS) research initiative. This project sponsored by the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and executed in the Northern Virginia. The project objective is to help the government improve its flawed information technology acquisition process through four key activities: Establish a collaborative network of government, industry, and academic experts who have succeeded at some aspect of OEIS; Study Internet successful stories and distill the lessons learned; Embed lessons learned into familiar government acquisition artifacts; Work with early adopting pilot projects to verify, validate, refine, and document best practices
Series/Report No
Department
Evolving Open Enterprise Information Systems