Air Marshal Ramesh Rai (retd)

The Network Centric Warfare (NCW) concept was first evolved by Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski of the US Navy and John Garstka in 1998. It echoed a new vision for war fighting using data and communication networks, to digitally link forces, enhance situational awareness and thereby increase effectiveness.

Situational awareness at the tactical and strategic level is the key to objective decision making, and in turn deploying forces to accrue gains and win battles. The underlying theme is to get to the right information, to the right forces, who in turn would take the right action to achieve the right objective. The NCW concept has since been embraced widely by military forces across the world, with the underlying motif of force multiplication through shared situational awareness and to fight a collective war. In our neighbourhood, both Pakistan and China have embarked on adopting the NCW concept as a tool for war fighting.

As per a Rand Corporation report titled ‘Systems Confrontation and Systems Destruction Warfare’ by Jeffery Engstrom, on how the Chinese armed forces seek to wage modern warfare, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) operational configuration does not exist in peacetime, and would be purpose-built taking into account the scope, scale, and abilities of the adversary’s operational systems in each warfighting domain. The evolved configuration would combine operational forces, through integrated information networks. Thus, pointing out that networking would form the central tool in employing Chinese forces in any future imbroglio. China is on its path to preparing to fight in the future, on a fifth-generation war construct.

A fifth-generation air war construct encompasses and combines aspects of network-centricity, combat cloud, multi-domain battle and fusion warfare (http://airpower.airforce.gov.au/APDC/media/PDF-Files/Working%20Papers/WP43-Fifth-Generation-Air-Warfare.pdf). This is where the future battle space is headed. The fundamental frame of such a war is based on interconnectivity for instantaneous information sharing, quick decision making and integrated action. This requires a four-layered grid arrangement, as a way of war fighting i.e. sensing grid, information grid, effects grid and command grid to form what can be called as the global information grid (GIG) that covers the entire battle space.

Within the GIG, a sensing grid would detect, track, and identify targets and an information grid would receive, process, store, protect and communicate information quickly and securely. These grids form the basic geometry to make the big picture of the battle. Sensing grid would comprise anything ranging from dedicated sensing systems, based in space, air, sea or land, up to even the single soldier on the battlefield. Each sensor would