Netcentric Warfare

Report

How China Understands and Assesses Military Balance

China sees itself as the weaker side in the overall military balance with the United States, largely because it has made only limited progress in the key areas that will define future warfare. Those include informatization and system-of-systems–based operations.

Report

French Army Approaches to Networked Warfare

The French concept of network-centric warfare argues that information-sharing enables forces to forgo armor and mass and underpins France's push for a middle-weight force -- one that can deploy to Africa but is robust enough for higher-end threats.

Report

Acquiring a Mosaic Force: Issues, Options, and Trade-Offs

Mosaic Warfare envisions more fractionated, heterogeneous forces, dynamically composed on tactical timelines. In this report, the authors present insights from a policy game to assess alternative governance models for acquiring a Mosaic force.

Report

Findings on Mosaic Warfare from a Colonel Blotto Game

Is Mosaic warfare more cost-effective and robust than more-monolithic approaches to conflict? Game theory can be a useful tool for studying the relative utility of these strategies.

Report

Modeling Rapidly Composable, Heterogeneous, and Fractionated Forces: Findings on Mosaic Warfare from an Agent-Based Model

Mosaic warfare is named for the idea of creating a complex image from small pieces. This report studies Mosaic warfare and explores complexity of platforms, complexity of targets, and relative density of platforms and targets.

Report

Distributed Kill Chains: Drawing Insights for Mosaic Warfare from the Immune System and from the Navy

In Mosaic warfare, individual warfighting platforms are assembled like ceramic tiles to make a larger "mosaic," or force package. The authors apply lessons from the human immune system and a U.S. Navy project to mosaic warfare.

Report

Ensuring U.S. Air Force Operations During Cyber Attacks Against Combat Support Systems: Guidance for Where to Focus Mitigation Efforts

RAND researchers developed a process for prioritizing functions and information systems in assessing mission assurance under cyber attack, a challenge due to the number of systems, range of vulnerabilities, and variety of combat support functions.

Journal Article

Cyberspace Is Not a Warfighting Domain

Cyberspace has become the new high ground of warfare, the one domain to rule them all and in the ether bind them, which, as this essay will argue, is the wrong way to view cyberspace and what militaries can do by operating within it.

Commentary

Awlaki's Death Hits al-Qaeda's Social Media Strategy

Though Awlaki will be difficult to replace—since he effectively coupled both propaganda and operations—al-Qaeda will continue to plan attacks overseas against Western targets, writes Seth Jones.

Journal Article

Groups, Networks, or Movements: A Command-And-Control-Driven Approach to Classifying Terrorist Organizations and Its Application to Al Qaeda

Appropriately describing the properties and defining the boundaries of terrorist groups is frequently challenging.

Commentary

U.S. Environmental Groups and 'Leaderless Resistance'

Published commentary by RAND staff.

People

James Dimarogonas

People

Jonathan Roberts