Information Sharing Among Military Headquarters

Military commanders work within stressful and fast-changing circumstances and need to understand the complexities of decisionmaking in intricate networks. New concepts such as network-centric operations and distributed and decentralised command and control have been suggested as technologically enabled replacements for platform-centric operations and for centralised command and control in military operations. But as attractive as these innovations may seem, they must be tested before adoption. This report, conducted by a joint US/UK team, proposes a theoretical method to assess the effects of information gathering and collaboration across an information network on military decisions taken by a group of local decisionmakers. The authors use the Rapid Planning Process and previous work on the effects of network-centric warfare to analyse the quality of decisions in an alternative structure. Specifically, they assess the effects of collaboration across alternative information network structures in carrying out a time-critical task, identify the benefits and costs of local collaboration using a relationship based on information entropy, and look at how a multitude of unneeded information, or ‘information overload’, affects a system.