: Armed with a general understanding of the concepts of Information Superiority and Network Centric Warfare, enterprising individuals and organizations are developing new ways of accomplishing their missions by leveraging the power of information and applying network centric concepts. Visions are being created and significant progress is being made. But to date we have been only scratching the surface of what is possible.

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Understanding Information Age Warfare

War is a highly complex and dynamic form of social conflict. This book demonstrates the importance of using sociological tools to understand the changing character of war and organised violence. The author offers an original analysis of the historical and contemporary impact that coercion and warfare have on the transformation of social life, and vice versa. Although war and violence were decisive components in the formation of modernity most analyses tend to shy away from the sociological study of the gory origins of contemporary social life. In contrast, this book brings the study of organised violence to the fore by providing a wide-ranging sociological analysis that links classical and contemporary theories with specific historical and geographical contexts. Topics covered include violence before modernity, warfare in the modern age, nationalism and war, war propaganda, battlefield solidarity, war and social stratification, gender and organised violence, and the new wars debate.

https://assets.cambridge.org/97805215/16518/frontmatter/9780521516518_frontmatter.pdf

The Sociology of War and Violence

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Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo

: Attempts have been made to develop some general understanding, and ultimately a theory, of systems that consist of many interacting components and many hierarchical layers. It is common to call these systems complex because it is impossible to reduce the overall behaviour of the system to a set of properties characterising the individual components. Interaction is able to produce properties at the collective level that are simply not present when the components are considered individually. Warfare is a complex system that is linked and interacts (in a coevolving way) with the surrounding socioeconomical and political context. Forgetting that war and warfare are an intimate part of a much larger complex system will lead to incomplete and even dangerously incorrect conclusions. Applying the approach of Complexity Theory to warfare leads one to the self-consistent realisation that warfare will have to be analysed in its larger context. Further work will need to examine how coevolution across the entire network of military, socioeconomical, and political interactions leads firstly to emergent effects at higher levels, and of equal importance how such effects lead to coevolution at the higher level. It will also be important to consider the robustness of such networks, and their vulnerability to damage.

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Complexity Theory and Network Centric Warfare

RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND ® is a registered trademark. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of its research sponsors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from RAND. PREFACE The impetus for this monograph was provided by a project on force transformation for the Commander in Chief, U.S. Joint Forces Command and his Director of Joint Experimentation (J-9) and a project on advanced modeling methods for the United States Air Force Research Laboratory. The monograph also drew on the research of a cross-cutting project on transformation concepts for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff. This study should be of interest to both civilian and military consumers of analysis and the analysts and modelers who seek to inform development of military forces and doctrine.

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Effects-Based Operations : A Grand Challenge for the Analytical Community

From the Publisher:
This report presents the results of a project sponsored by the Director of Strategy, Plans, and Policy, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans, Department of the Army Staff. It reports on project research aimed at developing measures of effectiveness (MOEs) for ground forces in the Information Age. The objective of the project was to help the U.S. Army, in both its strategic planning and its operational research communities, begin to identify new MOEs that can capture the improved effectiveness expected to accrue to ground forces as they exploit Information-Age technologies. * As originally conceived by the sponsor, the purpose of the project was not to produce a full list of MOEs appropriate to the Army in the Information Age-or even the last word on the few we present-but, rather, to provide a firm foundation for their further development, as well as some prototypes. This research was carried out in the Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program of RAND Arroyo Center, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the United States Army.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA387294.pdf

Measures of Effectiveness for the Information-Age Army

: The Future Combat Systems (FCS) program was the largest and most ambitious planned acquisition program in the Army s history. As a program it was intended to field not just a system, but an entire brigade: a system of systems developed from scratch and integrated by means of an advanced, wireless network. Moreover, the FCS-equipped brigade would operate with novel doctrine that was being developed and tested along with the materiel components of the unit. To paraphrase the Army at the time, FCS was Army modernization. In 2009 the FCS program was cancelled, although some of its efforts continued on as follow-on programs. The FCS program had garnered considerable attention throughout its existence, but few studies have been released documenting the lessons from the program to aid the Army in moving forward from such a large acquisition termination. In 2010, the Army s Acquisition Executive asked RAND Arroyo Center to conduct an after-action analysis of the FCS program in order to leverage its successes and learn from its problems.

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Lessons from the Army's Future Combat Systems Program

An examination of the 1999 conflict in Kosovo, with a focus on joint military operations. The 1999 military operation against the Yugoslav Army in Kosovo suggests several areas in which Joint military operations were deficient. This study examined all aspects of the Kosovo conflict, including its political and historical underpinnings, in an attempt to understand these deficiencies and to recommend improvements. This document--provided in both a classified and unclassified version--is based on extensive original source documents and interviews with most of the principal participants, and serves as the definitive Army record on Kosovo. While the primary focus of the research was on U.S. Army involvement, it covered many other aspects of Operation Allied Force. Topics included NATO objectives in Operation Allied Force, air and ground planning, evolution of the air operation and its effects on fielded Yugoslav forces, Task Force Hawk, and peace operations. The 1999 military operation in Kosovo suggests several areas in which Joint military operations were deficient. This study examines all aspects of the Kosovo conflict, with a focus on U.S. Army involvement, including its political and historical underpinnings, in an attempt to understand these deficiencies and to recommend improvements.

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Disjointed war : military operations in Kosovo, 1999

: Insurgency is one of the oldest forms of conflict. Records of ancient regimes show how their rulers were frequently faced with revolts and insurrection. The reality that insurgency is a continual problem has persisted into the modern era. The United States Army spent decades conducting what was, essentially, a counterinsurgency in the American West during the period after the Civil War; the British Army was faced with multiple insurgencies during the period of Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and as the colonial era came to an end in the post World War II period, the Western militaries especially their armies continued to face this challenge. Today, the problem of combating insurgencies continues to loom large for the armed forces of several western nations. Yet despite this, the preference of most Western militaries has been to focus on conventional combat operations against the armed forces of another nation state. This is reflected in the spending patterns of the NATO nations today. Compared with the money devoted to new systems for high-intensity combat, the amount invested in the preparation for irregular warfare pales. Of course, quality does not equal quantity, and a strict resource metric does not necessarily gauge emphasis. However, when we couple the money spent with the relative ability of nations to conduct conventional and counterinsurgency operations, it is clear that the emphasis is on conventional forces. What is the reality that faces the Western militaries today? Iraq provides a useful example. Whereas the major combat operations phase in Iraq lasted some 23 days (from the time U.S. and UK forces crossed the border from Kuwait into Iraq to the last major battle in Baghdad on April 10, 2003) the counterinsurgency period has lasted some 1,700 days as of this writing. This is consistent with the norm of post-World War II insurgencies.

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Walter L. Perry

Papers

Measures of Effectiveness for the Information-Age Army

Lessons from the Army's Future Combat Systems Program

Disjointed war : military operations in Kosovo, 1999

Analytic support to intelligence in counterinsurgencies

The Future of Warfare