How Do We Build Information Systems That Support Network-Centric Warfare?

Scott Renner

etwork-centric warfare (NCW) will enable the U.S. military to take advantage of Information Age technology to meet the threats of the future. At its core is the ability to share information securely and in real time over seamless networks.

The term "network-centric warfare" encompasses the emerging tactics, techniques, and procedures used by a networked force to create a decisive warfighting advantage. "Seamless networking" does not refer just to a communications network implemented over physical cables, radio links, and TCP/IP. The key to NCW is the network of connections among people in different organizations. It is their shared information and situational awareness that lead to faster decision-making and synchronized effects in the battlespace.

MITRE has been working with the Department of Defense (DOD) for years to develop NCW approaches and technologies. For example, we act as systems engineer for many elements that contribute to NCW, and we have developed architectures to guide and evolve the concept. One of the areas we are focusing on is information interoperability among people and the information systems they use.

There are many challenges still to be addressed before NCW can be fully implemented. How should we build these systems so that they meet the needs of the future? Let's begin by looking at six highly probable predictions for the NCW future. From these we can derive a number of implications for system development—both things we should do now and problems we will have to solve along the way.

In 2015...

The military will have most of the robust, seamless network connectivity it requires. Situations where it cannot send data from one participant to another will be rare. There will be many participants on that network, on the order of 106 or 107. Many will be fully automated. All will need to exchange information with others. Bandwidth limits will be a problem, especially as warfighters get closer to actual combatants. The services will be able to get some data to everyone, everywhere, but not always all the data anyone could want, anywhere. Information assurance concerns will be critical. U.S. information systems will be a high-value target to any adversary. Information technology (and the people who understand it) will become widely available to adversaries. Competitive advantage will come from knowing how to best apply the technology that everyone can acquire. Working out the best ways to employ IT will be an iterative process—a coevolution of technology, doctrine, and organization. Change will be the constant. Reducing time within the iterative process will maximize our advantage.

These six predictions describe a world in which NCW has been successfully implemented. So what are the preconditions for that success?

Figure 1: A publish/subscribe (or post/pull) architecture matches data producers' descriptions of their products with data consumers' descriptions of their needs.

Other common services will include identity management, authentication, and authorization. All these services must work across the DOD environment—any seam will produce a barrier across which information cannot flow.

However, we must not purchase this seamless operation at the price of a rigid infrastructure and inflexible mission applications. The ability to quickly update or implement new operational capabilities is essential to quick coevolution.

How can organizations build information systems to achieve both seamless integration and flexibility? One approach is to use the Command and Control (C2) Enterprise Reference Architecture (C2ERA), which is mandated for use in all Air Force C2 information systems. It is often viewed as a technical concept of operations for C2 enterprise integration, showing developers what they should do today to build C2 systems that will fit into the net-centric world of tomorrow. The key elements of the C2ERA are:

• Mission applications are separated from infrastructure services. The infrastructure is further divided into the Common Integrated Infrastructure, which is the same across the enterprise, and into node platforms, which may vary.
• Mission applications that support related operational activities are gathered together and managed as a C2 Node. The C2 Node Manager is responsible for delivering and sustaining integrated capability, such as a weapon system, to operational users.
• Information exchange between C2 Nodes is implemented using least-common-denominator, XML-based data exchanges. The goal is to preserve the independence of the C2 Node implementations, so that a change to one C2 Node will not necessarily force all others to change.
  

At the DOD level, we see a similar construct known as Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES). Like the C2ERA, NCES also identifies a set of core enterprise services that are separated from mission applications and "edge" user clients, all connected by a seamless communications network backbone. We expect the two concepts to merge completely over time.

Information Object Publish/Subscribe.

NCW requires great flexibility in the information-exchange arrangements between network participants to accommodate speed when necessary. Pairwise connections, which must be laboriously arranged by people ahead of time, will no longer suffice. We will need a publish/subscribe (or post/pull) architecture (figure 1), in which producers describe the data and make it available on the network. Consumers then describe their information requirements, and an infrastructure matches up the descriptions of what consumers need with descriptions of what producers have posted.

Subject-Area Vocabularies for Communities of Interest.

To support NCW, the DOD must have common vocabularies to describe the information that producers have and that consumers need (everything from target coordinates to resource lists). These common vocabularies are necessary for users, who have to understand how to look for the data they want to pull, as well as what that data means when they get it. The vocabularies are also necessary for system builders, who have to understand what the data means so their software can use it. We say "common vocabularies" because we expect the DOD will have several vocabularies, rather than a single common vocabulary, and the approach has to be flexible enough to accommodate that. Instead we'll form several (overlapping) communities of interest, each with its own common vocabulary.

Operational Architecture for Directing Co-Evolution.

Architecture, especially operational architecture, helps the DOD direct the co-evolution of technology, doctrine, and organization. These architecture products include descriptions of information flows, and the people who construct and use the architecture products must have a common vocabulary for describing the information in these flows. In this way, architecture becomes the chain that links the mission capabilities, the systems, and the users who employ them.

Information Preplanning. The publish/subscribe approach permits information flexibility. Every mission capability depends on certain essential resources: people, material, and facilities. Informa-tion will become another mission-essential resource, and the DOD must plan for its availability.

Plans for information availability must eventually be grounded in known, identified data owners. The DOD must assign authority and responsibility for creating and maintaining data. This entails a culture change as there must be real accountability for ensuring that the right information is available and delivered to the right people—in the same way that today there is real accountability for ensuring the availability of people, material, and facilities.

Conclusion

We continue to help the DOD solve the problems of information technology, architecture, and management as it builds the net-centric information systems of the future. Overall, we want to ensure that the DOD has the necessary information management procedures (and supporting infrastructure) to make the right information available at the right time, so decision-makers have the best information available.

For more information, please contact Scott Renner using the employee directory.

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