The slow death of a buzzword: network-centric warfare

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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