Extending the NEC Concept

Abstract : The concepts for NEC, which are very closely aligned with the NCW tenets and framework, have been generated over the past two years and are now being used to investigate future military capability. In the main these investigations have been concerned with command and control. However, of late some inquires have originated from sources whose systems are totally automated and are at the one of the ends of a sensor to shooter chain. The current NEC Themes, the encapsulation of the NEC concept, and the published NEC Benefits Chain, have been unable to fully support these inquiries. Whilst the lower levels of the NEC Themes directly supported the inquiry, those of better networking and better information sharing, the higher order themes, particularly Shared Understanding had little applicability to the inquirers. This was due to the very human/cognitive nature of these themes. A new Theme, concerned with the equivalent of sharing understanding between automated machines, is added to the existing NEC Themes and the NEC Benefits Chain is totally re-written to include the concepts of Individual Machine understanding and sharing it between many machines.