Network-Centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter through Three World Wars (review)

For many readers of Technology and Culture, the history of naval technology likely brings to mind the scholarship of Elting Morison. A generation ago, Morison chronicled how the forces of bureaucratic conservatism inhibited naval technological developments, from fast cruiser Wampanoag to the gunnery reforms of William S. Sims. While scholars have come to question many of Morison’s conclusions about technological conservatism, few have strayed from his fundamental units of analysis: the evolution of warship technology and the exploits of key individuals.

Norman Friedman’s Network-Centric Warfare offers a welcome break from this “hulls and heroes” historiography, providing the first comprehensive account of twentieth-century naval command and control at the operational level. For some two decades militaries have employed the term “network-centric” to describe operations coordinated through digital computers and secure communications links, but Friedman argues that the first widespread application of what he prefers to call “picture-centric warfare” actually dates to the early twentieth century, when British admiral Sir John Fisher created an ocean surveillance system in the Mediterranean. The goal of Fisher’s system was to provide the Admiralty with an accurate picture of potential enemies so that in the event of war the British could annihilate opposing fleets before they had time to combine. Introducing a recurring theme, the author argues that the motivation behind such an approach was both technical and financial. As the cost of building warships skyrocketed, navies had to do more with less.

Relying on a mix of primary and secondary sources, Friedman divides the history of picture-centric warfare into three eras. The first began around 1900 with the adoption of radio. Naval radio made picture-centric warfare possible by providing distant command centers with nearly real-time information, which in turn made remote command and control feasible. This era lasted until World War II, when radar allowed for more timely and accurate plots of a given battlespace. The radar era was relatively short-lived, however, because by the mid-1950s jet aircraft and guided missiles permitted adversaries potentially to overwhelm manual plotting techniques. Naval officers sought a solution to this problem through the digital computer, a technology that could rapidly organize, transmit, and disseminate data. Friedman devotes a majority of his book to this computer era of naval warfare, beginning with a description of efforts to build what eventually became the Naval Tactical Data System, and ending with a discussion of systems only recently declassified. Along the way he provides a useful analysis of naval command and control systems developed outside Britain and the United States, most notably those of Canada and the Soviet Union.

The book’s overarching thesis, directed mainly toward military and naval officers, is that a useful picture of the battlespace, combined with effective command and control links, supports a new kind of warfare in which those employing a networked approach gain enormous potential advantages. For historians, however, the value of Network-Centric Warfare lies largely in the way it provides a window into the human-machine relationships Elting Morison also found so fascinating. For example, Friedman argues that while designers relied heavily on Moore’s law to create functioning command and control systems, they simultaneously failed to establish safeguards that could have prevented errors like those leading to the Stark and Vincennes incidents in the 1980s. Furthermore, he reveals how even the best commanders had difficulty evaluating information sanitized for display, a problem exacerbated by the proliferation of compartmentalized classification programs during the cold war.

Network-Centric Warfare also demonstrates how analyses of command and control systems can shed light on events that have puzzled historians. For example, it shows how the Royal Navy’s apparent backwardness in tactical radio during World War I actually stemmed from its sophisticated code-breaking and radio-direction-finding systems (which revealed the dangers of unencrypted radio communications); how the loss of Admiral Takeo...