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(More customer reviews)This book is a chronology of how naval command and control (C2) systems evolved over the last 100 years in response to changing technologies and threat environments. It focuses especially on the U.S. Navy, but includes discussions of foreign naval developments as well. It is an indispensable book to understand how the U.S. Navy's conception of `command and decision' (CD), the navy's version of C2, led incrementally to the current CD system sometimes called Network Centric Warfare (NSW), but which Friedman prefers to call `picture centric warfare'. As Friedman makes clear NSW is only the latest iteration of a continually evolving concept. Friedman has identified three phases that mark the evolution CD systems: the radio phase; the radar phase; and the computer phase.
The first phase is what he calls the [wireless] radio phase. This began in the first ten years of the 20th Century, when First Sea Lord, Sir John Fisher (of Dreadnaught fame) determined that the most economical way to deal with the problems facing the Royal Navy was to introduce what today would be called a centralized C2 system based on ocean surveillance, wireless communications, signals intelligence and what today are called flag plots (i.e. ship locations). Fisher then proposed to use the information produced by this system to vector ships against enemy naval threats. WWI (1914-1918) saw Fisher's concept tested and proven. Fisher essentially created the first command, control, communications , intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C3ISR) system concept on which all future developments were based.
The U.S. Navy took the lead in Friedman's radar phase which really began in WWII and lasted through the Cold War. The takeaway in this phase is that the exponential growth of information from an increasing number of multiple sources, made information management more and more difficult. This period saw the development of the ship borne Combat Information Center (CIC) as a means of coping with information overloads.
In his third phase Friedman notes that computer based innovations, (e.g. Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS)) have provided at least a temporary solution to information management. And that there is a good reason why NCW, the latest CD iteration, is called an information driven concept.
This is an excellent book that fortunately includes a list acronyms that is indispensable for following Friedman's sometimes dense prose.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Network-Centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter Through Three World Wars
Over the past decade, the United States has moved toward a new style of warfare, called network centric, that uses an almost real-time, shared picture of a military situation as the basis for operations. To explain what network-centric warfare is and how it works, defense analyst Norman Friedman uses specific historical examples of actual combat rather than the abstractions common to other books on the subject. He argues that navies invented this style of warfare and that twentieth-century wars, culminating in the Cold War, show how networked warfare worked and did not work and illustrate what net-on-net warfare means. The book builds on Friedman s personal experience in an early application of network-centric warfare that developed the method of targeting the Tomahawk anti-ship missile.To give readers a realistic feeling for what the new style of warfare offers and what is needed to make it work, the book concentrates on the tactical picture, not the communications network itself. Friedman s focus on what the warriors really want and need makes it possible to evaluate the various contributions to a network-centric system. Without such a focus, Friedman notes, the needs of networked warfare reduce simply to the desire for more and more information, delivered at greater and greater speeds. The information he provides is valuable to all the services, and students of history will appreciate the light it sheds on new ways of understanding old conflicts.
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