One could argue that the US defence establishment has a somewhat schizophrenic relationship with the idea of network-centric warfare. Land forces proponents in particular have historically resisted the conception that advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have resulted or will bring about a “revolution in military affairs.” However, ICT in many ways underpins the key tenets of US military concepts and force design, especially as the US defence budget falls. At the strategic level, the debate is essentially one over whether ICT presents circumstances that fundamentally alter the nature of warfare itself. At the operational level – that is,...

France, Germany and the United Kingdom are all well on their ways towards military digitization and the ability to field a truly Network Enabled Capability (NEC).

At a national strategic level, all three countries appear to have each taken a slightly different path. In some ways, the countries’ experience with their individual soldier digitization programs provide a metaphor for their wider experience. For example, France’s early adoption and commitment to its FELIN digital soldier ensemble and its relatively late deployment into Afghanistan enabled the country to develop a cohesive package of systems that worked together at an individual level and...

This chapter provides an overview of Forza NEC, the procurement program led by the Italian Army (IA) and started in 2007, which aims to develop a netcentric architecture with the goal to provide “information superiority” through the digitization of the armed forces. By adopting a very focused approach, Forza NEC intends to meet the operational needs of the Army acquiring specific assets and/or modernizing those already owned. In fact, the program has undertaken a significant stage of development and experimentation – the so–called “Concept Development & Experimentation” (CD&E) phase, which is the current phase of the program – to validate...

Nowadays, it seems prosaic to remind how the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has completely transformed the economy and the same societies of the Western countries and, to a certain extent, of the whole world. It seems prosaic because we get used to the permanent flow of information between a huge quantity of different and physically distant devices through the network – computers, TVs, tablets, smartphones, etc. – and we get used to their growing speed in processing and integrating data, destroying the barriers among textual, video and audio formats. All this takes place at an exponentially increasing connection speed,...