Caught in the Net: Lessons from the Financial Crisis for a Networked Future

Abstract

Since 2000 the Department of Defense (DOD) has committed itself to implementing a vision of the future of combat usually referred to as Network-Centric Warfare (NCW). This vision, as described by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration, holds that robustly networking the force will improve information sharing, collaboration, and shared situational awareness. (1) The DOD has invested considerable resources in its efforts to develop and implement NCW despite criticism from within and outside the armed forces. Much of the inspiration for NCW came from the business world, particularly the technological and organizational changes associated with information technology. These business roots have been a source of ammunition for NCW's critics, who argue that, at least when it comes to operations, uncertainty in war makes business and war incompatible.... Business and war certainly have significant differences, but this critique is simply incorrect. Uncertainty is a major factor faced by businesses and militaries alike. Both compete with rivals to survive, innovate to improve their performance, and act despite uncertainty, risk, and information scarcity. These similarities are pronounced enough that, when they are correctly adopted, ideas and theories from the business world can provide insight on many issues facing militaries, including operational and strategic ones. (2) The fact that business ideas can help militaries, however, does not necessarily strengthen the argument for NCW. The current financial crisis was caused in part by pervasive mistakes and misjudgments in the financial world. These mistakes were enabled, and their consequences aggravated, by network effects and cognitive errors rooted in technological approaches to dealing with complexity and uncertainty. Just as examples from the business world inspired NCW, the current crisis, which has a size and severity exceeding that of any since the Great Depression, illustrates risks that the designers and users of the future network have to understand and mitigate, risks not previously identified by critics of NCW. The crisis shows that while networks can substantially improve organizations' efficiency and performance, they can also leave them vulnerable to an unpredictable cascade of failures. The network-centric approach promises to allow commanders to understand battlefields with unprecedented clarity and fidelity. The financial crisis, however, shows that these tools can mislead as well as illuminate due to their simplification of a far-more complicated underlying reality. Finally, NCW will create the potential for simulations of future battlefields that would provide commanders with tools of unprecedented power for managing risk and uncertainty. Failures in risk-management models played a key role in the financial crisis, however. They can lead to massive and unanticipated errors if the models do not accurately capture reality and instead give users a false confidence in their understanding of the environment. This article uses the financial crisis to illuminate these three potential dangers inherent in the NCW approach. This critique is not meant to suggest abandoning NCW, but rather to recommend a cautious approach to the critical endeavor of preparing the American military for its networked future, one that takes all potential risks into account. Net-Centric Warfare Background The movement toward NCW is official DOD policy. The last Quadrennial Defense Review Report in 2006 described the net-centric vision: Harnessing the power of information connectivity defines net-centricity. By enabling critical relationships between organizations and people, the Department is able to accelerate the speed of business processes, operational decisionmaking, and subsequent actions. Recent operational experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated the value of net-centric operations. …