Legacy of Arthur Cebrowski and Network-Centric Warfare

Over on Zenpundit you’ll find a useful round-up of a rather intemperate exchange between Noah Schachtman of WIRED’s Danger Room and Thomas P.M. Barnett of Pentagon’s New Map fame. In Zenpundit’s words:

By now many of you have probably read the exchanges between Thomas P.M. Barnett and Noah Shachtman of WIRED’s Danger Room over Shachtman’s recent article “How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social - Not Electronic“. If you haven’t, the exchange pretty much went like this:

 

“Wired’s subpar Iraq analysis“ -Barnett

 

“My ‘Weird’ Article, ‘Well Worth the Read’ ” -Shachtman

 

“Tom’s reply to Noah” - Barnett

 

“Blog Fight? Zzzzzzzzzz” - Shachtman

 

“File it under whatever you want“ - Barnett

Read the rest of his post.

As it happens I have the smallest of dogs in this fight as I wrote an article for The Journal of Strategic Studies, ‘The More You Know, the Less You Understand: The Problem with Information Warfare’ (Vol. 29, No. 3, 2006), which relates to the question at hand so here’s my little yip yapping view on the matter:

Proponents of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and its derivative concepts Information Warfare (IW) and Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) often like to quote Sun Tzu’s famous maxim ‘Know the enemy and know yourself, then in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.’1 There is much to be said for such an approach. Indubitably, possessing ‘information dominance’ over one’s opponent is a ‘Good Thing’ because in war the soldier who is less aware of his tactical situation than his opponent is the proverbial ‘dead manwalking’. Moreover, although it is customary in the literature on discontinuous military change to cite some variation of Andrew Marshall’s idea that an RMA requires not only technological innovation but also doctrinal and organizational adaptation, with a few exceptions RMA enthusiasts are technological determinists. This is not surprising either because achieving ‘information dominance’ is, in part, a technological matter. Still, there are good reasons to be cautious about the impact of technology and information on contemporary warfare because neither is a panacea for its particular ailments; indeed, while solving or ameliorating some problems of warfare they create or compound others….

First, while high technology has already demonstrably transformed war in the air and, arguably, at sea,2 it has not had commensurate impact on land warfare. Implementing NCW on land is an order of magnitude more difficult because, paradoxically, it is a lot easier to be ‘network-centric’ if you are ‘platform-centric’ to start with. People do not live in the air or on water; being in these environments, let alone fighting in them, depends on having a ship or an airplane, a ‘platform’ in other words, (which may work more effectively when ‘networked’ with other ships and planes). Destroy or disable the ‘platform’ and nature does the rest. These environments are less cluttered and easier to computer model and they are inherently orientated on fighting machines, with or without human operators. As a consequence, the NCW view of war as an exercise in rapid target identification and engagement (closing the ‘sensor–shooter gap’) is quite appropriate. Land warfare, on the other hand, despite the presence of fighting machines is inherently ‘people-centric’. The object is not so much the destruction of the enemy (though that may be a part of it) but the changing of his mindset. War on the ground is fought by, on behalf of, and among people – a basic fact which NCW, in its current formulation, being essentially silent on the political and psychological dimensions of conflict tends to ignore.3

As I saw (still see) it the basic problem with NCW is the absence of the enemy. If you look at the seminal Cebrowski and Garstka paper in Parameters that launched the idea ‘Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future‘ you’ll find a discussion of the logical model of NCW. Unfortunately the web version doesn’t seem to have the graphic that goes with the article so I’ve ripped a version from an article which reproduced it ‘Performance Prediction of a Network-Centric Warfare System‘:

The problem here as I see it is the absence of the enemy. You’ve got ‘objects’ at the left hand top corner and ‘negated objects’ on the right hand. That’s not a representation of war that’s a representation of the efficacious mechanical alignment of weapons with targets: killing. I’m not being squeamish here. Killing is a part of war. A part, not the whole. The alignment of means with the realization of desired political outcomes is a lot more complicated. In other words, NCW a valid and valuable concept of battle (would anyone like not to have a networked force?) but limited in scope.

That Barnett was one of the earliest critics of NCW (see ‘Seven Deadly Sins of Network-Centric Warfare‘) yet the two developed a strong working relationship afterward suggests that Schachtman’s characterization of Cebrowksi was over the top. Cebrowski’s intellectual legacy was broader, deeper and more nuanced than Schachtman admits, which strikes me as sloppy and rather unfortunate (ad hominem never speaks well of those who employ it, particularly when the target is dead). If you are interested in a fuller, fairer and more accurate estimation of Cebrowski’s legacy read James R. Blaker’s Transforming Military Force (caveat: I’m only halfway through it).

That said, while it’s unfair to lay the Iraq debacle at Cebrowski’s feet as Schachtman seems to do at the beginning of the piece, I’m rather sympathetic to the general thesis of the article. It is true that the RMA-thinking of which NCW is a derivative has led us into the strategic mess we now face. As I wrote in another related article ‘Redesigning Land Forces for Wars Amongst the People’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2007):

The bulk of the land force is focused on regular, inter-state war-fighting of like against like, a task which technology is making possible to do with relatively few ground troops working in conjunction with precision fires delivered by air and naval assets; but the main threat is posed by irregular opponents in ‘wars amongst the people’, the fighting of which calls for skills and mindsets that are still too often seen as a niche or separate capability. If the problem of meeting current and future threats could be solved merely by taking, holding or destroying this or that objective, then the current arrangement of forces could be continued. The problem, however, is winning ‘wars amongst the people’ and for that, the battlefield must be repopulated by soldiers whose training and mindset is inherently opposite to the ‘never put a man where you can put a bullet’ logic of the Revolution in Military Affairs and its derivative concepts.

Clearly, in the story of US force transformation in which Cebrowski played such a crucial part the chapter on post-’major combat operations’ Iraq will be rather inglorious. But the story is not finished yet. And while Cebrowski was no Boyd his legacy is not the caricature presented by Schachtman.