The term "network-centric warfare" appears to be heading to the ash-heap of history's buzzwords.
Noah Shachtman's article this week in Wired magazine motivated me to do a bit of research on Lexis-Nexis.
So I looked up "network-centric warfare" references by year in the Lexis-Nexis database. Here are the results.
1997: 27
1998: 83
1999: 97
2000: 117
2001: 192
2002: 535
2003: 752
2004: 800
2005: 731
2006: 586
2007: 357 (so far)
The trend is pretty clear: usage of the term is in decline after a 2004 peak, which neatly corresponds with the concept's undoing in the insurgent warfare of Iraq.
For posterity's sake, I've excerpted the very first reference of the term in the Lexis-Nexis database. It came from a House of Representatives hearing March 20, 1997. The speaker, of course, was the late Admiral Arthur Cebrowski.
"Corporations today rarely view themselves as company centric. Rather, they see themselves existing and operating in a network market place, an evolving ecology. If you take the case on the technical level of IBM -- and many of you recall that their stock didn't do so well several years ago -- but it bounced back. It bounced back with a very thoughtful new chief executive officer who, after keeping his own counsel and studying the issue for a while, announced that it is not computer centric processing, it is network centric processing. The power comes from the network.And that changed his business. You see it now in Sun, you see it in many industries in America, this notion of the power that comes from networking.
It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that we are coming to the same conclusion in the military, and we're moving from platform centric warfare to network centric warfare. The focus shifts from platforms to capabilities, and that's a very fundamental shift.
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on December 1, 2007 7:09 PM | Reply
This catch phrases death is the most "striking" example of the end of the Former SecDef's influence in the department. It appears that the adults and not the theorist are back in charge at the Pentagon.
on December 4, 2007 7:58 PM | Reply
As we observe the constant pendulum swinging at the Pentagon, when the pendulum swings away from NCW and towards COIN, will we witness once again the pendulum swing too far?
The Pentagon isn't exactly an organization known for NOT repeating a mistake. I tend to think NCW still has its place, shouldn't be killed off, but like all doctrines studied and perfected to identify the potential and limitations within the context of each service.
"Admiral" Arthur Cebrowski originally developed MCW for the Navy as a concept to turn the collection of ships into a unified fleet. The concept of coarse grew, but when you are talking about as many as 20 ships controlling an area of sea the size of Europe, one should ask the question, what good under those conditions is the human interaction and distributed presence factors stressed in COIN doctrine. Such questions lead back to NCW, highlighting the reality that not all doctrines are applicable for all services, as the conditions and environment are different.