NCW AND MODERN MILITARIES
1. The revolution in technology has been the prime mover for NCW and hence the military’s harnessing the evolving technologies are at the fore front of NCW transformation. The transformation will significantly change the military operations in the 21st century. The modern militaries will transcend the 3rd generation warfare and will operate in an environment more akin to contemporary private sector organizations. Information Age militaries will differ from predecessors with respect to their strategy, degree of integration, and approach to command and control.
Strategy
2. The conventional war visualized military strategy primarily as ways of causing degradation and/or defeating an adversary’s military …show more content…
NCW and information technology removes the distinction in phases of war. Contemporary crises call for a dynamic balance between military and nonmilitary objectives. Military strategy has also been re adjusted within the crises management / cycle. NCW has led to an effects-based as against attrition-based strategy. The new measures of effectiveness for military operations have also been developed. Enemy attrition and loss-exchange ratios are not the only measure of success; EBO is simply a recognition of this. It is an explicit enunciation of the objectives of a military operation, how these military objectives relate to overall nation’s objectives, and the cause-effect relationships that link military actions to effects to military objectives to mission objectives. While attrition is part of an effects-based strategy, but information age has changed the face of the relationship of the military to conflict …show more content…
NCW allows modern militaries to be much better organized through integration and net-working thus creating synergy of effects. The various dimensions of military operations include echelon, coalition/joint, function, time, and geography . The real challenge in command and control is integration . It is about getting a number of things to work toward a common purpose in a way that maximizes the totality of the resources available. The way command and control should be exercised in the Information Age depends upon what actually works best in the set of circumstances and challenges associated with present and future military missions . Information Age missions are characterized by a large degree of unfamiliarity and complexity, and by exacting time pressures and constraints. They will require rapid, decisive, and precise responses. Military is shifting to an approach involving the massing of the desired effects rather than the massing of forces. This, in turn, means that forces can be geographically dispersed. Dispersion of forces may result from either the inability to mass physically in time or a desire to maintain separation to avoid being an attractive target. This gives rise to the concept of lean militaries in modern