Transforming NCW

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, there's been a lot of compare/contrast among NCW, "irregular warfare", 4GW, and the ideas of military thinkers like John Boyd. I have no training in this area, so I can't really judge, but it seems to me that there's more overlap than difference among the key ideas of these frameworks...at least at the model/conceptual level.

As I've mentioned before, Figures 5 and 11 of "The Implementation of Network Centric Warfare" seem to be conceptually applicable across the entire diplomatic, information, military, economic, and socio-cultural development (DIMES) spectrum, and mostly consistent with the contrasting frameworks mentioned above.

These thoughts were triggered (yet again) by an article on irregular warfare in today's Washington Post. Just because the US DoD has emphasized certain aspects of NCW and focused on breaking things doesn't mean that the NCW model is limited to those aspects and to breaking things.

For a more in-depth consideration of irregular warfare, this paper is solid, yet brief, introduction.

As an aside, it's interesting to note how prophetic William Gibson was in his Sprawl trilogy and subsequent writing about the kinds of memes that emerge from a hyperconnected multi-dimensional effects-oriented information-based culture. I read Neuromancer when it first came out in the mid-80's, and his description of the Panther Modern's terrorist disruption to cover Molly while she's stealing the Dixie Flatline remains a vivid example of what I'd call NCW today (i.e., entirely consistent with Figures 5 and 11, but nothing like what the DoD calls NCW).