The New High Ground: Network-Centric Operations Are The Key To Future Success In Operations From Battlefield To Homeland Security To Business

Abstract

As the Internet has exponentially increased the power of individual computers through its world wide web of links-the military, homeland security and border control authorities have come to understand the vastly superior results that can be achieved by networking their assets. For the military and homeland security users, this networking of systems falls under the concept of network-centric operations. Compared to the Internet, complex though it is, developing Network-Centric Operations (NCO) is a vastly more ambitious undertaking. For example, the vast majority of the world's computers use a handful of operating systems and computers are upgraded and replaced so regularly that the standards of the Internet have been incorporated almost universally. For NCO, the users face a wide range of communications systems, proprietary operating systems, and much longer cycle-times for upgrades that most computers. They also must confront decades-long life cycles for the platforms they use. Still, the benefits of NCO are potentially enormous and the task is well understood. This paper presents an overview of the concept of NCO, its components and how it has the capacity to fundamentally change military, homeland security, border control and other security operations.