Applying the Information Age Combat Model: Quantitative Analysis of Network Centric Operations

The nature of and the approach to command and control is evolving in order to meet the challenges of Information Age warfare. One of the main tasks of command and control is the arrangement of the assets within a combat force in order to ensure their ability to manage and exploit information. Connectivity between the various assets represents existence, capacity, reliability, and other attributes of links establishing the connectivity. The Information Age Combat Model was introduced by Cares in 2005 to contribute to the development of an understanding of the influence of connectivity on force effectiveness that can lead eventually to quantitative prediction and guidelines for design and employment. This paper describes the model and several extensions to it. It presents an initial attempt to achieve such an understanding through the quantitative analysis of a basic but powerful model of network centric operations to demonstrate the correlation between connectivity and effectiveness. It also documents first prototypical studies showing how these results can be used in current models and can even contribute to a new generation of combat models that are net-centric instead of using the current platform-centric approach. 2 The International C2 Journal | Vol 3, No 1