Network-Centric Warfare

How we Think, See and Fight in the Information Age

Sanjay Poduval

• Publisher: KW Publishers
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9789386147561
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The present age widely referred to as the information age has changed the nature of wars not in degree but in kind. Warfare is no longer confined to the militaries or to the battlefields but has transcended into the civilian domain; today, it also involves the entire government infrastructure, the commercial and economic zones.Network Centric Warfare (NCW) is applicable to all levels of warfare and contributes to the coalescence of strategy, operations and tactics. It is transparent to the mission, force size, its composition and geography. NCW has many attributes which has enabled it to become as potent as it is today. These characteristics have been made possible mainly due to technology and rapid progress in every sphere which has ensured rapid computing and diminishing the tyranny of distances. While the Nuclear Age spawned a return to limited war, the Information Age has had its own unique impact on the conduct of military operations. This century has been characterised by the widespread impact of technology in many fields. Information, communications and data processing have profoundly influenced every significant aspect of human activity and have irrevocably transformed war-fighting methodology. The distinction between war and peace has blurred and is reaching the vanishing point with no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between "civilian" and "military" is fast disappearing as is evident from the number of cyber intrusions in the defence, scientific, banking and commercial sectors the world over. As a result, most states today are perpetually at war; a war of a different kind, not against tangible elements but against bits and bytes. Terrorism is a reality today; it is a growing menace in the civilised society and is here to stay. It has taken warfare into the civilian domain. It is difficult to predict where, when and what will be struck and, therefore, not possible to keep a standing force at all vulnerable points. This has led to wars of the present being more covert, with the adversaries learning to use the strengths of the Information Technology (IT) against the proponents. This information war is split between the offensive and the defensive. The advantage more often than not lies with the attacker who can choose the time and place of the attack. The blurring of offence and defence reflects the dual nature of NCW; it tends to defy and cut across standard boundaries, jurisdictions, and distinctions between state and society, public and private, war and peace, war and crime, civilian and military, police and military, and legal and illegal. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for a government to assign responsibility to any single agency — e.g., military, police, or intelligence—to be in charge of responding. Sharing information and massing of forces becomes critical for quick and effective action. This book will be of immense value to not only the defence community but also to all those interested in understanding the way conflicts of the present generation affect the lives of the entire population. No particular academic background has been assumed of its readership. All arguments developed in the paper are couched in terms of concepts that are introduced in the paper.

1

History and Evolution of Network-Centric Warfare

Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never know peril.

— Sun Tzu

The history of war permeates with instances of a player using superior knowledge garnered from various sources to gain a war-winning advantage. The fact is that the more knowledgeable player has the advantage of being able to anticipate the opponent’s moves and deployment patterns and is better poised to field his assets to fashion the desired results. The ‘various sources’ referred to are the extension of the eyes and ears into an adversary’s domain which constitute the information deriving web. This, when properly coordinated and with proper security, timeliness and reliability, forms a war-winning network. Referring to the “network” environment as a noun means an interconnected group or system, while “to network” denotes the act of interconnecting. Networking is not novel; it has evolved over a period of time and its methods have changed. Network-Centric Operations (NCO) deal with shaping networks to exploit the emerging environment to one’s advantage. The fundamental philosophy of Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) is that the network makes the difference. The aim here is to trace the roots of NCW in the context of the present. The chapter also endeavours to highlight a few of the important features which have developed to enhance the speed, precision and lethality of operations.

Tracing the Roots

Historically, every nation has sought to create a “usable military advantage” over its enemies and potential adversaries to create an asymmetric advantage in its favour. Therefore, providing fighting forces the most accurate intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information is nothing new to the military. The need to be connected with the troops was an essential requirement since times immemorial. Information was passed by means of hand signals, smoke screens, drum beats, etc for tactical positioning. Visual communications had reached a peak by the end of the 18^th century and was the primary means of communications for forward control. Large and small flags, heliograph and oil lamps with shutters for night communications were utilised. Skilled operators could signal from 8 to 12 words per minute.

However, the search for usable military advantage relied heavily on acquiring superior technology and instruments of warfare, besides devising superior military strategy and tactics. The roots of today’s network-centric warfare can be traced back to the time when telegraphy was introduced. The British used wireless telegraphy extensively during the Second Boer War 1899-1902 in South Africa. Strategically, telegraph was used for communications back to the Home Government in London by submarine cable. In the theatre, the land line was used to control formations down to the level of divisions and occasionally lower, later in the war. During the Boer War, the Telegraph Battalion’s section laid 18,000 miles of telegraph and telephone cables. A total of 13,500,000 messages were handled in four years. It was also the first time a telegraph battalion provided technical and strategic communications for the army when Gen French used telegraph and telephones to control artillery fire.¹

Radio Communication

The Russo-Japanese War which broke out in the year 1904 as a result of the conflicting interests between St. Petersburg and Tokyo was probably the first war which exploited the newly introduced radio systems to communicate plans with their respective forces at sea. The radio equipment was more user friendly, less cumbersome and did not require a specialist for operation. The Japanese fleet commanded by Admiral Togo, had set up a system of continuous surveillance by carefully positioning their patrol ships at key locations. The success of Admiral Togo’s plan relied on the premise that he would have maximum early sightings because of tactically positioned ships and, more importantly, swift early warning by radio. In short, the whole plan was based on the efficiency and speed of the radio communication network without which the Russian ships commanded by Admiral Rozhestvenskiy could slip through. In the battle that followed, the Japanese fleet, because of better coordination between the ships and helped by Admiral Rozhestvenskiy’s decision of a complete radio blackout, enabled the Japanese to have an information upper hand which resulted in a famous victory for Admiral Togo. The important issue here, even when networking was in its primitive stage, was that it was a double-edged sword. Had Admiral Rozhestvenskiy decided to disrupt the Japanese communication which was very much possible, the outcome of the battle may well have been different.

The Austrians were probably the first to realise that this weakness was an excellent means of acquiring political and military intelligence which was previously obtained through costly and dangerous espionage missions. In fact, when a political crisis arose in 1908 as result of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Austrians intercepted and deciphered Italian radio traffic through their network and used this intelligence to shape their foreign policy.² This was perhaps the first time in history that the course of a military campaign conducted hundreds of kilometres away was followed move by move by technical means.

Air Defence Systems

Networking progressed many notches with the advent of radars. The radar was developed in great secrecy in Great Britain, and from 1937 to 1939, it developed into the core of the world’s first integrated Air Defence System (ADS) known as Chain Home (CH). This consisted of twenty-one 300-foot masts sited along the east coast of Britain, and its coverage stretched from the Isle of Wight to the Scottish border, forming a network of radar defence, supported by Chain Home Low (CHL) stations, which were able to detect low flying aircraft. ³

Following the outbreak of World War II, they were put into action during the Battle of Britain. The Chain Home System was complemented by Ground Control Intercept (GCI) radars which vectored the Air Defence (AD) fighters on to the hostile aircraft formation. In addition to the control of AD, fighters Britain had set up a defence system which brought all the weapons available into play.

Chain Home radar stations, which could ‘see’ an enemy raid, in some cases while it was still over France, were positioned all along the coast. The raid was reported to Fighter Command Headquarters (FCHQ) where it was passed down to the Group Headquarters, which further passed it on to the Sector Control Rooms affected by the plot. The entire system was meshed for information sharing in both directions. The height of the raid was provided by Observer Corps posts once the raid came within visual sighting range. The sector controller then knew exactly where the enemy was and alerted the balloon sites in possible target areas to put up a balloon barrage. The balloons forced the German pilots to fly their bombers higher, which made bombing more difficult and also ensured that the intruding aircraft were in the radar envelope for as long as possible. The sector controller also forewarned the anti-aircraft gun sites along the route of the raid, of the ensuing raid so that they were ready to fire when the enemy came within range. Most importantly, the sector controller could scramble fighters from his sector airfields and vector (direct) them towards the incoming raid. In order to vector the defending fighters on to an incoming raid, the controller had to know exactly where they were. The last link in the defence system, keeping track of the Royal Air Force (RAF) fighters, was Direction-Finding or D/F radio stations. These also reported to their local Sector Control Room. The RDF information was crude by modern standards, but was more than sufficient to give bearing and range information on an incoming raid. This information was transmitted to all other sectors in the command to keep the “Big Picture” spread throughout the system. By doing this, the loss of a single Sector Control Room did not destroy the Fighter Command’s ability to function as an effective defence. As a result of this deployment, when the German offensive actually began on August 12, 1940, the German bomber pilots, much to their surprise, found that the British fighters systematically placed themselves in advantageous positions and managed to time their confrontation over the English Channel. Winston Churchill summed up the effect of the battle and the contribution of the Fighter Command with the words, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

The Kammhuber Line

In 1940, Col later Gen Josef Kammhuber was tasked to build a night air defence for Germany in 1940, which came to be known as the Kammhuber Line.⁴ Initially, the Kammhuber Line involved an extensive network of searchlights, radar, and night fighters based in occupied France, Belgium, and Holland, covering the approach routes of the British bombers. Early on, searchlights illuminated each bomber as a Messerschmidt Bf-110 or Junkers Ju-88 night fighter assigned to that area closed in for the kill. In 1941, a radar-controlled master searchlight was introduced which made the Kammhuber Line even more effective by locking onto bombers automatically and illuminating the target with a pale blue guide beam that manually directed searchlights could pick up.

Radar-directed searchlights gave way to a more elaborate system of search and tracking ground radar and radio stations, known collectively as the “Himmelbett” system. A Himmelbett station consisted of a Freya radar for early warning with a range of 60 to 150 km, a Würzburg radar for plotting bombers, and a second Würzburg radar was utilised for guiding the fighter aircraft. Each Himmelbett zone or “box” had a radius equal to the range of the Würzburg tracking radar (about 43 km wide and 34 km deep). These boxes were the building blocks of the improved Kammhuber Line. Target range, altitude, speed, and bearing data were sent to a ground control station that directed the fighters towards the British bomber stream. Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers flying into Germany or France had to cross the Kammhuber Line at some point, and the Freya radar operators would detect them and direct Würzburg radars to illuminate the plane. All position reports were sent to the Himmelbett control centre, thereby allowing controllers in the Himmelbett centre to get continuous updates on the positions of both planes. The second Würzburg radar controlling the German fighters would direct them to intercept the now illuminated bomber. Thus, each night fighter was like a spider at the centre of an invisible web of beams.

The Bekaa Valley Conflict

Over the years, command, control and communications capability progressed steadily, improving the operating picture provided to commanders at various levels. The Bekaa Valley conflict carried this further. The conflict, known for bringing Electronic Warfare (EW) to the fore and the innovative use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the battlefield, was also important for the manner in which the more intangible network was used to decisive war-fighting advantage. It was the first combat operation involving the use of the modern Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft, E-2C Hawkeye.⁵ It could scan 3 million cubic miles of air space, monitor over 200 aircraft simultaneously and control up to 130 separate air-to-air engagements at ranges up to 250 miles.⁶ This capability enabled the Israeli Air Force (IsAF) to detect Syrian aircraft as they took off, allowing it to determine how many hostile aircraft were inbound and from which direction. The Israelis also used F-15s in the rear as “mini-AWACS” to help manage air-to-air engagements. The integration of these systems ensured a high level of situational awareness. The Israeli aircraft were vectored to the ‘blindside’ of Syrian MiGs which had only nose and tail threat warning receivers. They also effectively neutralised the Syrian radar and communication systems leaving them isolated and vulnerable to AWACS directed attacks from F-15s and F-16s. The result was chaos within the Syrian formations.

Another technological innovation was the use of UAVs. They were used not only as decoys but also as intelligence gathering platforms for finger printing the Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) radar frequencies and streaming almost ‘real time’ video to the E2C Hawkeye and to the command and control centres on the ground. The SAM complexes were neutralised as soon as they were switched on. They were targeted by surface-to-surface missiles or by anti-radiation missiles launched from F4 Phantoms. Overall, the Bekaa Valley conflict provided the first example of warfare in real-time in which air reconnaissance and distribution of its results to the attacking forces was carried out almost simultaneously in rapid succession, closely coordinated by AWACS and ground stations using secure and reliable communication and video links in an electromagnetic intense environment.

A magnified version of this was evident in both the Gulf War of 1991 and Iraq War of 2003. The shift in focus from the platform to the network is obvious. The emphasis now is to view actors as part of a continuously changing ecosystem rather than viewing them as independent entities.

The Web as we Know it

Network-centric warfare can trace its immediate origins to 1996 when Admiral William Owens introduced the concept of a “system of systems” in a paper of the same name published by the Institute of National Security Studies. Owens described it as the serendipitous evolution of a system of intelligence sensors, command and control systems, and precision weapons that enabled enhanced situational awareness, rapid target assessment, and distributed weapon assignment. As a distinct concept, however, network-centric warfare first appeared publicly in a 1998 US Naval Institute Proceedings article by Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski and John Gartska, “Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origins and Future”. It described a new way of thinking about military operations in the Information Age and highlighted the relationship between information advantage and competitive advantage. Given the short period of time that has transpired since then, there has been an enormous amount of progress in getting the fundamental tenets of Network-Centric Operations (NCO) understood.

The term “network-centric warfare” broadly describes the combination of emerging tactics, techniques, and procedures that a fully or even partially networked force can employ to create a decisive war-fighting advantage. NCW is an information superiority enabled concept of operations that describes the way forces will probably organise and fight in the Information Age. NCW generates increased combat power by networking sensors, decision-makers, and shooters to achieve shared awareness, increased speed of command, high tempo of operations, increased lethality, and greater survivability.

NCW Today: A Bird’s-eye View

The utility of networked information produced by integration of radars, communication systems, AWACS, Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), etc, is beyond dispute. NCW today envisages the integration of information from all sensors and making it available, as required, wherever required, to the authorised recipients. The objective is to provide a very high level of situational awareness that will, in its wake, lead to greater efficiency in the prosecution of war. The availability of information is not intended to be a one-way street, but field units can also demand information in real-time and vice versa. With an effective network, the geographic location of the controlling authority becomes irrelevant. It could occupy a permanent/relocatable location immaterial of where the battle is being waged. With good situational awareness and communications, quick decisions can be arrived at, transmitted and implemented. This is a conside...