Paper no. 1089

16. 05. 2004

Network Centric Warfare

by Kamal H

(This is a paper by invitation.  Network centric warfare is increasingly getting important.  India has the capability   though nothing has been done so far-  Director ) 

Information technology has become an integral part of life all over the World. Before I go deep into Network Centric Warfare let me explain the functioning of modern day very massive information technology companies like Microsoft, Cisco, IBM etc. 

These companies use information technology extensively to automate human and computer interaction for the maximum efficiency of the company. They have integrated all the departments and systems of the company like sales, advertising brand name, business development, marketing, market research, customer support, after sales support, keeping the company web pages up to date, customer feedback, customer satisfaction, software engineering, hardware engineering, product engineering, product documentation, product testing, quality management, human resources, recruiting, employee satisfaction, employee career planning, offshore development, consultants, finance, new product innovation, R & D, quarterly results, press releases, operations, inventory, suppliers management, and many more divisions of the company to function as a single entity with the main goal of productivity of the company. This ! level of integrated human functioning using computers and technology evolved only in the past 15 years of time. The core value of these companies is their ability to respond quickly to changing needs of the customers and always be on top of the market. Running these kinds of companies is like continuous low/medium intensity warfare. As an example if some Microsoft software fails in NASDAQ it gets fixed with highest level of efficiency, feedback gets incorporated in the next product, engineering gets notified about the fix and most of the other people in NASDAG and Microsoft won’t even know that such a problem ever occurred. This level of automation on need to know basis makes the companies intellectual property very secure. These processes and technologies in these companies evolved overtime and they are becoming better everyday. 

Network centric warfare in a similar manner tries to automate the warfare using humans, computers and military equipment in such a way to win the war. This involves developing an information technology infrastructure and coevolved mission capability. This can not be done overnight and also no one knows how the final system will look like. It is a continuous process and involves very high amount of experimentation and field testing to perfect the process. Information technology systems play a major role in NCW. A minimum level of information technology infrastructure is very essential to start evolving NCW processes. India needs the following infrastructure to start evolving NCW ! concepts and processes. 

  1. Information Communication Network

This involves setting up a backbone optical network. This network should be spread out geographically with multiple nodes all over India. India can use the commercially available systems like router, switches etc. to setup this network. In order to secure the network the data entering this network and leaving this network should be encrypted using proprietary algorithms. These algorithms have to be developed in house and preferably implemented in the system using both software and hardware. These algorithms have to evolve continuously to changing technologies. 

  1. Information Collection Systems

The information collection systems are called thin clients. These clients can be very dump like sending simple satellite pictures or very intelligent which can send processed data. There can be multiple types of thin clients like camera pictures, motion detectors, satellite pictures, human intelligence, news reporters, military personnel, civil personnel, computers, etc. All these information needs to be encrypted using the above mentioned methods and sent on the backbone network for processing. These thin clients also involve developing huge number of embedded systems. 

  1. Information Processing systems

Processing these huge amounts of data can only be done using in house developed parallel programs running on clustered supercomputers. India has proven supercomputing knowledge which can be used to build these processing nodes. There is huge LINUX or FreeBSD UNIX based software available which we can use as a starting point. We need to build our own proprietary security shields on top of LINUX/BSD to use it for our NCW system. 

  1. Levels of Information Networks

The processing nodes should form multiple hierarchies so that the decisions making process can be distributed. If the human decision is minor it can be taken on the field itself where as a critical decision should come from the command centre. The data sent from the thin client should enter only required networks for security. 

  1. Command & Control Centers

These are places where military and civil personnel take various decisions which get carried out in the field. These centers provide the processed data in a form by which people here can make intelligent decisions in real-time. 

  1. Evolution Processes or Coevolved Mission Capability

This is the major task of Network centric warfare. These processes have to be conceptualized, designed, developed, tested and finally feedback needs to incorporate for continuous improvement. This can involve terrorist incidents like hijacking an airplane or to full fledged nuclear warfare. Every scenario will involve development of software, hardware, communication protocols, people training, finally field testing and attaining perfection. 

  1. India’s Strengths and Weaknesses

India has huge pool of talented young technology professional who can be easily guided to develop software and hardware systems needed for NCW. India’s main weakness is in creating processes involving people from various disciplines and using the computers more effectively. The other main weakness of India is complete lack of hardware industry like that of China or Taiwan. NCW requires building our own proprietary hardware systems and it is better to develop some of these systems in India for security reasons. India needs to encourage military venture funded R & D startup companies. 

  1. Integrating with Military Systems Procured from Other Countries

Integrating our communication protocols in systems procured from other countries will involve some knowledge sharing and it needs to be handled keeping in view of the security of our backbone network. 

Finally Network centric warfare is a process, it can not be copied from others. It needs to be evolved in house for Indian needs. It is a continuous process and gets better day by day as the technology improves.

(Email: kamalh1232000@yahoo.com)

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