NWC Review, Winter 2001: Smith

NWC Review, Winter 2001: Smith: "What is network-centric warfare? What’s the point? Many attempts to answer these questions emphasize the “network” and the new technologies used to create more effective sensor and communications architectures. These architectures, it is argued, will enable us to create and exploit a common situational awareness, increase our speed of command, and “get inside the enemy’s OODA [observe, orient, decide, and act] loop.”1 Yet such descriptions of technologies and capabilities can leave us asking the same questions: What is it? Just what does it bring to warfare? Why is it so critical to America’s future military power that we must give up other capabilities to buy it?