The heart of network-centric strategy is to move power to the edges helping anyone "on the team" to access critical information that may affect their operation. In a campaigns we have grown to disconnect the opposition research, polling, donor, volunteer and other information from campaign workers. The teams working on registration of voters and voter turnout rarely had key analysis of the neighborhoods they were working. The information did not feed over to fundraising teams. There was a failure for the entire team pulling for public interest to have situational awareness....
IS it important ? ...consider this parallel from the NYTImes peek at the Pentagon's priorities.
Link: Smart Mobs: "A God's-eye view" of the battlefield.
The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats - "a God's-eye view" of battle.
This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery" from a spy satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds."
What's the price tag?
The Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information Grid, or GIG. Conceived six years ago, its first connections were laid six weeks ago. It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build the new war net and its components.Not weapons, but interconnections
Advocates say networked computers will be the most powerful weapon in the American arsenal. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence and soldiers in a global network - what they call net-centric warfare - will, they say, change the military in the way the Internet has changed business and culture."Possibly the single most transforming thing in our force,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, "will not be a weapons system, but a set of interconnections."
