Network Enabled Operations Research Articles

Towards Secure and Interoperable Underwater Acoustic Communications: Current Activities in NATO IST-174 Research Task Group

Although the area of underwater acoustic networking is getting mature and critical for a wide variety of commercial applications, the lack of secure underwater communication standards presents a major impediment for adopting these networking technologies within NATO operations. The NATO Research Task Group IST-174 “Secure Underwater Communications for Heterogeneous Network-enabled Operations” aims to study and to demonstrate secure underwater communications in a holistic approach. In particular, this group's ambition is to define waveforms, network protocols and architectures that will enable underwater connectivity in a secure and interoperable way. To that effect, this paper presents various security concepts and communication systems currently under development that could be included in those standardisation efforts.

Mission Command in the Age of Network-Enabled Operations: Social Network Analysis of Information Sharing and Situation Awareness.

A common assumption in organizations is that information sharing improves situation awareness and ultimately organizational effectiveness. The sheer volume and rapid pace of information and communications received and readily accessible through computer networks, however, can overwhelm individuals, resulting in data overload from a combination of diverse data sources, multiple data formats, and large data volumes. The current conceptual framework of network enabled operations (NEO) posits that robust networking and information sharing act as a positive feedback loop resulting in greater situation awareness and mission effectiveness in military operations (Alberts and Garstka, 2004). We test this assumption in a large-scale, 2-week military training exercise. We conducted a social network analysis of email communications among the multi-echelon Mission Command staff (one Division and two sub-ordinate Brigades) and assessed the situational awareness of every individual. Results from our exponential random graph models challenge the aforementioned assumption, as increased email output was associated with lower individual situation awareness. It emerged that higher situation awareness was associated with a lower probability of out-ties, so that broadly sending many messages decreased the likelihood of attaining situation awareness. This challenges the hypothesis that increased information sharing improves situation awareness, at least for those doing the bulk of the sharing. In addition, we observed two trends that reflect a compartmentalizing of networked information sharing as email links were more commonly formed among members of the command staff with both similar functions and levels of situation awareness, than between two individuals with dissimilar functions and levels of situation awareness; both those findings can be interpreted to reflect effects of homophily. Our results have major implications that challenge the current conceptual framework of NEO. In addition, the information sharing network was largely imbalanced and dominated by a few key individuals so that most individuals in the network have very few email connections, but a small number of individuals have very many connections. These results highlight several major growing pains for networked organizations and military organizations in particular.

Relationality: An Ethical Response to the Tensions of Network-Enabled Operations in the Kunduz Air Strikes

‘German warplanes fired on two hijacked military fuel trucks in the northern province of Kunduz killing an estimated 90 villagers….’ While the debate over what is now known as the Kunduz Air Strike in 2009 has by no means ended, it has – or so I shall argue – missed a key point. By allowing the media's witchlike hunt for a scapegoat to dominate the military debate, a critical consideration concerning the ethics of network-enabled operations has been overlooked. As such, I take the tragedy of the Kunduz air strikes as a case study of the failure of network-enabled operations, focusing on the ethical questions that this raises. To do so, I will begin with a description of what happened before, during and after the air strike. Following this, I consider three ethical concerns that arise as a result of network-enabled operations. I end with a proposal to increase the possibility of ethically reflective decision-making in network-enabled operations, which calls for a relational type of thinking and a complementary form of training.

EXTENDING THE THEORY OF NORMATIVE PRACTICES: AN APPLICATION TO TWO CASES OF NETWORKED MILITARY OPERATIONS

The theory of normative practices has proven to be helpful in eliciting the normative dimension of social practices. In this article we apply the theory to military practice. Since current military missions are Network Enabled Operations, which mandate a strong focus on cooperation with other military and non-military partners, an additional framework is needed to understand actual problems in such missions. We have extended the theory of normative practices with interrelations (enkaptic, part-whole, and juxtapositional). Two cases from missions in Afghanistan have been analyzed to show the usefulness of the theory of normative practices and its extension with interrelations.

An agent-based approach towards network-enabled capabilities – I: Simulation validation and illustrative examples

This paper presents an approach to understanding network-enabled operations using agent-based simulations. We describe the newly created agent-based software ABSNEC (Agent-Based System for Network Enabled Capabilities), highlighting some of its salient features: the ability to represent human factors towards the analysis of battle outcomes in network operations, and the ability to represent realistic force structures with tiered C2 architectures. We provide affirmative results of three validation techniques to date on the model. Finally, we demonstrate the utilization of ABSNEC to acquire meaningful insights for analysis through two examples: a study on the interrelationship between fratricide, human factors, and situation awareness; and the generation of alternative combat strategies for a military engagement.

Effects of Sleep Loss on Team Decision Making: Motivational Loss or Motivational Gain?

To examine the effects of 30 hr of sleep loss and continuous cognitive work on performance in a distributed team decision-making environment. To date, only a few studies have examined the effect of sleep loss on distributed team performance, and only one other to our knowledge has examined the relationship between sleep loss and social-motivational aspects of teams (Hoeksema-van Orden, Gaillard, & Buunk, 1998). Sixteen teams participated; each comprised 4 members. Three team members made threat assessments on a military surveillance task and then forwarded their judgments electronically to a team leader, who made a final assessment on behalf of the team. Sleep loss had an antagonistic effect on team decision-making accuracy and decision time. However, the performance loss associated with fatigue attributable to sleep loss was mediated by being part of a team, as compared with performing the same task individually - that is, we found evidence of a "motivational gain" effect in these sleepy teams. We compare these results with those of Hoeksema-van Orden et al. (1998), who found clear evidence of a "social loafing" effect in sleepy teams. The divergent results are discussed in the context of the collective effort model (Karau & Williams, 1993) and are attributable in part to a difference between independent and interdependent team tasks. The issues and findings have implications for a wide range of distributed, collaborative work environments, such as military network-enabled operations.

Network-Enabled Missile Deflection: Games and Correlation Equilibrium

The problem of deploying countermeasures (CM) against antiship missiles is investigated from a network centric perspective in which multiple ships coordinate to defend against a known missile threat. Using the paradigm of network enabled operations (NEOPS), the problem is formulated as a transient stochastic game with communication where the appropriate strategy takes the form of an optimal stationary correlated equilibrium. Under this strategy, ships cooperate through real-time communication to satisfy both local and collective interests. The use of communication results in a performance improvement over the noncommunicating, Nash equilibrium scenario. This framework allows us to develop a theoretical foundation for NEOPS and captures the trade-off between information exchange and performance, while generalizing the standard Nash equilibrium solution for the missile deflection game given in [1], The NEOPS equilibrium strategy is characterized as the solution to an optimization problem with linear objective and bilinear constraints, which can be solved calculating successive improvements starting from an initial noncooperative (Nash) solution. The communication overhead required to implement this strategy is associated with the mutual information between individual action probability distributions at equilibrium. Numerical results illustrate the trade-off between communication and performance.