Evolution of military sense making from knowledge management point of view

This paper defines a road map that military sense making may be develop or revert. Sense making is based on OODA model for command and control. The dynamics of situation is modeled with Cynefin framework of four domains: Known, Knowable, Complex and Chaotic. The behaviour of sense making is explained in each situation and some references on military culture is included to give example.

Introduction

Military Knowledge Management has changed as societies are evolving and now we are questioning the rules of knowledge management of industrial era as opposed to information era. In this paper, a military combat operations process called OODA-loop defined by John Boyd  (1987) is studied in framework of knowing organisation defined by Chun Wei Choo  (1998).

This paper belongs to a series of papers that are describing the evolution of military competence and processes supported by evolving enablers in information management. There are three capabilities in military command and control process called OODA-loop from point of knowledge management:

1. Sense making, consisting of observation (sensing) and orientation (making sense), is interpreting the equivocal data by enacting interpretations.
2. Decision making, which is searching and selecting alternatives according to projected outcomes and preferences.
3. Knowledge creating, which is creating new knowledge and improving the whole OODA-loop through knowledge conversion and sharing of information.

This process is described in figure 1.

Figure 1: Orientation for military knowledge management from sense making, decision making and knowledge creating approach


This paper defines the major evolutionary path of each level of Knowledge Management and describes some short cuts or downshifts that some military organisations have faced when reaching for more revolutionary goals. Paper provides tools to do strategic diagnosis by describing possible paths on both separate and integrated road map where interrelations and challenges may be easier identified. This is to support strategic diagnosis within Information and Communications Technology that are supporting the Knowledge Management.

Orientation to road maps of Military Knowledge Management

There is a possibility to create a description of general evolution of Knowledge Management in Military Command and Control. A generic evolution is depicted with three roads of Decision making, Sense making and Learning figure 2.

Figure 2: Roads of military knowledge management within OODA-loop

This paper is describing the sub-road map for military sensing and sense making in more detail. 
 

Description of evolutionary paths in Military Sense making 

This paper is concentrating on how observing and orientation of Boyd’s OODA  loop is executed when military is facing four different situations in Cynefin  framework: 1. Known, 2. Knowable, 3. Complex and 4. Chaos. The fifth area of disorder in Cynefin framework is not studied to keep model simpler. There is a difference in sense making in these four situations, but sometimes military is constrained with very basic standard operational procedures not flexible enough to meet specific requirements. Four possible states of sense making are described in figure 3.

Sensing needs to overcome the fog  of battlefield and egocentricity of human sensors. Sense making needs to address the attempts of deception  by adversary, biases of sense making teams and individual mental models.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, 

you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. 

If you know yourself but not the enemy, 

for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. 

If you know neither the enemy nor yourself,

you will succumb in every battle”. 

Sun Tzu 

Sense – Categorize – Respond in known environment

In known environment cause and effect relations are repeatable, thus easily perceived and predicable. Here military is copying the best practices of other forces and defining them in their Standard Operational Procedures, SOP.

Both individual, team and organization are observing an event. Event is being categorized with previously defined model. Each category has a predetermined type of respond, which is being followed without orientation or decision making. This is the very effective method of improving reaction in sudden and stressful situations when amygdala takes lead and reasoning subsides as john Boyd defined when improving air dog-fight.

Often intelligence process is standardized in level of detecting features of enemy’s movement and organization. Observations are placed simply within enemy standard order of battle and fitted in to their known tactics. Understanding is predetermined in basic intelligence training when standard enemy is being explained. It is assumed that adversary is playing by the book.

”A frog living in a well will never understand the sea!” Taoist proverb

It is not often that adversary is behaving by the book. Even more harmful is when surveillance and reconnaissance systems are pre-programmed with these standard patterns and fail to detect anything divertive.

One might argue that at least one’s own organization and tactics is well known and predictable. This might be the case with fixed organizations and linear tactics. Problem arises when blue organizations are more per task than book and blue tactics needs at least to seem to adversary being complex if not chaotic.

Structured sense making requires also structured information. Especially in information dimension, the bulk of information is unstructured and more big data analysing needs to be done to make sense out of behaviour.

Sense – Analyse – Decide – Act in knowable environment

In this environment cause and effect are separated over time and space. It needs some scenario planning and systems thinking to create a possible model to describe the knowable environment. This is the environment where most flexible military organizations reside – task force organization, swarming tactics, combined arms battle technics.

After detection the incoming data needs to be analysed to reveal all effective cause-effect relationships. Sense making is evolving the scenarios as new data is appearing and trying to create bigger picture from smaller components and their inter-relationships with systems thinking. 

The analysis needs several experts working together and the challenges of collective sense making will appear: cognitive diversity creates clashes of individual mental models, but in another hand cognitive heterogeneity helps against homogeneity biases like myopia and egocentricity.  It requires trust relationships, social networks, the timing and frequency of intercommunication, the extent of information sharing and access to information. The teaming process may at best create a "shared, organized understanding and mental representation of the key elements of the team's relevant environment" 

"Any fool can learn from his mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others." Otto von Bismarck

It requires a learning organization to transfer the needed tacit knowledge to explicit in order gain value of it through entire organization. The learning aspect is analysed in special paper.

Current trends of Big Data and Business Intelligence are good example of organization trying to utilize all information it possesses. By fusing and correlating data differently, organization may create new knowledge and if succeeding in sharing it, may gain a competitive advantage.

Probe - Sense – Analyse – Decide – Act in complex environment

In complex environment cause and effect are only coherent in retrospect and similar events seldom repeat. Emergent patterns can be perceived but not predicted. 

It requires a probe to make possible patterns more visible for our observation. Understanding these emergent, new patterns needs multiple perspectives to be involved in sense making. It needs to create narratives as base for understanding as they are simple and easy to communicate between team.

“Understand the operating environment and your organization while constantly adapting for purpose”. From Gen McChrystal’s CrossLead Way

This sense making with pattern management and narratives requires flexibility from the ISTAR systems. Fixed pattern recognition is always deceivable thus the programmability of one’s sensors is essential.

Act - Sense – Analyse – Decide in chaotic environment

No cause and effect relationships perceivable in chaotic environment. System is turbulent and there is no time to wait patterns to emerge. One might assume that there is a potential pattern but it is not visible or reconstruction able.

It requires a quick and decisive intervention to reduce the turbulence and ability to sense immediately the reaction to the intervention. This deliberate action might create something that is either known or knowable and with effective observing and analysing it might make sense.

“Es gibt keine verzweifelten Lagen, es gibt nur verzweifelte Menschen.” 

Unofficially translated: there are no desperate situations, only people. 

Heinz Guderian

The quick and decisive action followed by close observation, analyses and main action was the strength of German staff officers in second world war against allied commanders with a good example of Guderian’s combined arms XIX Panzer corps advance towards the Channel of England in 1940 . 

Figure 3: Road map for military sensing and sense making from OODA approach

Leaps, downshifts and revolutionary paths on sense making map of possible roads

As sense making is affected by both organizational, team and individual models, there is more often possibility to downshift one’s capability to sense making rather than improving it.

A heterogenic team at very beginning has challenges in trusting to each other, communicating with people from different background and understanding their differing mental models. Before the team is aligned, it’s sense making capability is quite modest.

Especially in crises situation and under extreme stress sense making capability may collapse and very routines will sustain. 

Sometimes the feeling of having information superiority may cause a downshift, when complex situation is addresses as knowable and collecting more data is believed to provide the clarity eventually. This might have been the case in late ISAF operation, where the amount of collected data reached 40 exabyte (10^18) in a month. 

The military situation is more complex than Cynefin framework. Within the same area of operation, there might exist all four models of dynamics: 

• Own force and their action might be known or knowable
• Regular parts of adversary force might fall into knowable category
• Irregular or militant parts of adversary might fall into complex
• Society where operation is executed may seem chaotic.

It requires all four means of sensing and sense making processing parallel information from each part of area of interest and more complex orientation and sense making process than any of above defined.

Requirements for near real time recognised operational picture to give targeting information for target acquisition process may constrain the time and method using for fusion and recognition. Thus targeting may suffer from the capability of basic event categorising only and both friendly fire and collateral damage may occur.

Conclusion

The classical OODA loop and military sense making are more complex than first impression may reveal. Since sense making is always a social event, there is a major impact by the relationships between people. Both individual and team mental models take time to be aligned and it takes even longer to educate whole organization to follow same sense. If, in the other hand, organization is too homogenic, there is a danger to have too narrow, blind or not decisive enough sense making capability.

Sense making combined with decision making and organizational learning composes the very core of military command, control and communication culture. It should be studied when planning a major change in C4ISTAR systems.

Evolution of military decision making from knowledge management point of view

Abstract

This paper defines a road map that military decision making has been following from knowledge management point of view. Paper starts with a hierarchical and centralized decision making typical to all functional organizations. Study goes from sharing decision making at strategic level down to mission command of multiarms taskforces. Then is covers two phases of gradual increase of collaboration ending with self-synchronized swarming organization. The knowledge management road maps are defined to help improving the knowledge driven Armed Forces.

Introduction

Military Knowledge Management has changed as societies are evolving and now we are questioning the rules of knowledge management of industrial era as opposed to information era. In this paper, a military combat operations process called OODA-loop defined by John Boyd  (1987) is studied in framework of knowing organisation defined by Chun Wei Choo  (1998).

This paper belongs to a series of papers that are describing the evolution of military competence and processes supported by evolving enablers in information management. There are three capabilities in military command and control process called OODA-loop from point of knowledge management:

1. Sense making, consisting of observation (sensing) and orientation (making sense), is interpreting the equivocal data by enacting interpretations.
2. Decision making, which is searching and selecting alternatives according to projected outcomes and preferences.
3. Knowledge creating, which is creating new knowledge and improving the whole OODA-loop through knowledge conversion and sharing of information.

This process is described in figure 1.

Figure 1: Orientation for military knowledge management from sense making, decision making and knowledge creating approach

This paper defines the major evolutionary path of each level of Knowledge Management and describes some short cuts or downshifts that some military organisations have faced when reaching for more revolutionary goals. Paper provides tools to do strategic diagnosis by describing possible paths on both separate and integrated road map where interrelations and challenges may be easier identified. This is to support strategic diagnosis within Information and Communications Technology that are supporting the Knowledge Management.

Orientation to road maps of Military Knowledge Management

There is a possibility to create a description of general evolution of Knowledge Management in Military Command and Control. A generic evolution is depicted with three roads of Decision making, Sense making and Learning figure 2.

Figure 2: Roads of military knowledge management within OODA-loop

This paper is describing the sub-roadmap for military decision making more in detail. See other sub-maps or description of all roads in other papers of knowledge management maps by the same author.

Description of evolutionary path for Military Decision Making 

Authoritarian decision making in classical command and control 

Decisions are made at top, Commander-centric, orders are flowing down and reporting goes upwards by support of hierarchical knowledge management. 

This is the traditional decision making of Roman legions and beyond. Information flow is following line organisation to enable superiors to understand better situation than their subordinates. Situational information and orders flowing back down are delayed. Information is shared “need to know basis only”.

Carrying out tasks is based on pretrained procedures and there is no need to change behaviour during operation. Knowledge base is following the doctrine and managing issues following standard operational processes.

Decision making has boundaries of one-man as commander. Egocentricity is weakening one man’s decision making as follows:

• Human has tendency to forget information that does not support the adopted line of thinking
• Human has tendency to narrow one’s thinking.
• Human has tendency to feel superior based on one’s own feeling.
• Human has tendency not to notice facts and evidence that contradicts one’s beliefs or values.

Napoleon created staffs to manage more technical issues and advise in arms specific matters. Baron de Jomini  stated that “…, councils of war are a deplorable resource, and can be useful only when concurring in opinion with the commander, in which case they may give him more confidence in his own judgement,…”

Shared strategic intention with synchronised operational execution

Unlike his adversaries Napoleon  could delegate operational decision making to his general, who were heading Army Corps, bataillon carré. Corps was a small army that consisted combined arms and had better mobility than monolithic armies. Napoleon shared his battle intent with his commanders and gave them some degree of freedom in execution. This enabled numerical strength, deep strategic penetration and rapid concentration of force superior to adversaries. Prussian commanders were in other hand following straightforward line command and nurtured their troops to fear their officers more than enemy. Officers were from different society than their subordinates and soldiers were practically walking muskets for them.

Although Napoleon kept his plans himself and was successful because his personal capability in processing information, other organisations have been able to share fully the strategic information by actively collaborating between Corps heads. This provides good strategic and operational level awareness, alignment and manoeuvrability even if the lower levels in organisation are rigidly following orders and informing superiors in line.

After being outmanoeuvred entirely by Napoleon in Jena 1806 , Prussians renewed their officer education and created auftragstaktik, which was later translated to mission command.

Mission command

Wehrmacht honed the Auftragstaktik i.e. mission command to its best when their combined arms brigades were given missions and general staff officers as their commanders and chief of staffs were able to adjust their tactics according to situation. Officer training emphasised quick decision making, initiative and creative thinking. “Rules are for fools” was slogan used by the commander in chief of Reichswehr 1930-1934. 

In mission command tactical freedom is delegated to combined arms brigades level by giving mission to brigade with commanders battle intent. Brigades were expected to fulfil the mission with most suitable way adjusting their tactics as situation was unfolding before them. Commanders were controlling execution by defining end states rather than detailed goals. Force support in other hand was planned and coordinated in best German punctuality.

The mission command gave Germans tactical advantage over their Allied counterparts who were following more traditional line management, heavy planning and strict doctrine way of waging war.  

Modern operations are usually combined and including many stakeholders within the same area of operation. Commander does not have full command over the available resources thus mission command and commander’s intent has become essential.  U.S. General Gary Luck (2013) is requiring “Commander to provide quality guidance and intent that links strategic direction to operational approaches to tactical action, the essence of operational art. This starts with insightful dialogue to inform and be informed by national and international leadership. Quality guidance and intent, coupled with risk guidance, enables mission command.” 

Mission command requires continual dialogue with higher authorities and mission partners to better understand the changing environment and perspectives and what a shared understanding of right looks like. The continuing dialogue:

• deepens trust, 
• clarifies authorities for action, 
• assists problem framing as part of design, 
• enriches guidance and intent, 
• enables synergy with mission partners, 
• and coupled with mission-type orders, enables commander to release the disciplined initiative of subordinates to do the right thing. 

Mission command with peer level collaboration

First generation of Battle Management Systems enabled strong situation sharing and collaboration between peer leaders. Area of interest, Area of Effect and Area of support were created integrating units beyond their original force structure. 

New level of awareness flattened military hierarchical organisation because middle level commands were not anymore needed for control and quick reaction. Although the recognised operational picture is showing current situation to everyone interested, building and maintaining trust requires continuous dialogue between stakeholders. It will consume time differently but shared understanding enables empowerment, cross-domain synergy and eventually effectiveness manyfold compared more line and functional approach. The study of J7 DTD U.S. Armed Forces  proves that “collaboration releases the initiative of subordinates”. Somehow collaboration in operation today gives equal results that general staff education was providing 1930’s Germany.

Self-synchronising with swarming tactics

In postmodern operations the fact is, that most of the forces and resources are not under one command, thus commander-centric decision making is no longer purely applicable. The Network Centric Warfare (NCW) concept introduced C2 changes as information being “freed from the chain of command” , and questions that challenged the existence of a single chain of command , set the stage for the self-synchronisation . Power to the Edge  principle addresses the shift in relationships required to leverage shared awareness to foster self-synchronisation and achieve major improvements in mission effectiveness. Control is sustained with shared command intent and consciousness instead of tight line control.

Swarming is a way to manoeuvre forces to gain advantage in time and space. It is enabled by  

• agility, which is force needs to meet challenges of complexity and uncertainty.
• focus, which provides the context and defines the purpose of the mission in form of command intent or purpose.
• convergence, which is the goal-seeking process that guides actions and effects. It enables swarming units to coordinate their actions, apply force and know when to stop applying force.

Gen McChrystal was able to improve Special Operations Task Force capabilities about 30 fold in Iraq Operation 2006 when he came up with slogan: “If we’re going to win, we need to become a network”.  He transformed his task force from hierarchical command and control structure to the one of a swarming force. McChrystal explains the transformation strategy of Special Operations Task Force in Iraq as follows:

“We began as a network of people, then grew into a network of teams, then a network of organizations, and ultimately a network of nations. Throughout, we evaluated the health of our network by how well each node shared a common but ever-evolving understanding of our organization, of our battlefield, of our enemy, and of our strategy to defeat them—what we called ‘shared consciousness and purpose.” 

Figure 3: A Roadmap of Military decision making from Knowledge Management point of view

The decision rights are allocated in these decision making cultures according to the following figure 4.

Figure 4: Decision making and degree of interaction in each command and control culture. Adopted from Alberts (2009) 

As decision rights are delegated to lower levels, the need for interaction increases and demand for shared understanding becomes imperative. This transformation of command and control requires certain maturity in trust and fulfilling expectations. Peer collaboration takes more time and requires available Information and communications services, but may also multiply both effect of force and flexibility to counter surprise.

Leaps, downshifts and revolutionary paths on decision making map of possible roads

There are military cultural constraints that are keeping force at certain position of decision making. U.S. Armed Forces have been traditionally relying on sheer number of weight and numbers.  Attrition with dominance have been keeping the command culture centralized and emphasized planning and management more than leadership.

Improved communications and ability to gather up-to-date information from battle is not enabling mission or more loosely controlled battle management. The hunger for information at the top may produce a information overload resulting even longer lead times to prepare and launch operation. Van Creveld is describing the command situation enabled by helicopters and air space dominance as follows:

"A helpless company commander engaged in a fire fight on the ground was subjected to direct observation by the battalion commander circling above, who was in turn supervised by the brigade commander circling a thousand feet higher up, who in turn was monitored by division commander in the next higher chopper… With each of these commanders asking the man on the ground to explain the situation."

It takes time to develop a culture of decentralization and empowerment that is required in complex situations, where strategic corporal needs to make decision within the command intent.

It is far easier to return to more centralized command culture when returning to peace time garrison operations, tight fiscal constraints, and increased competition for promotion. With the low number of events happening during peace time it is also tempting to higher headquarters to centrally control the myriad of more detailed peacetime engagements. 

Military tradition is also keeping command culture to improve. In British military command culture Field Marshal Montgomery provided a leadership legacy that emphasises planning, advancing with limited objectives and leaving little or no room for change or subordinates initiative. Because of this approach he failed repeatedly to exploit successes. 

The division of labour for human manager is following the very rules by Taylor  and new tasks will create new function with new management and new workers to do it. This tendency is especially in peace time adding both depth and width to any military organization. Headquarters are gaining fat and additional governance and control measures that are suffocating lower level with reporting tasks. Information technology in worst case is increasing reporting tasks to the measure that company commander has no time to his unit.

Increasing functional labour division is also parting supporting elements from fighting units and different arms from combined arms combat. Cross domain trust cannot be establish during operation if there is no some experience from peace time training.

Conclusion

Military organisations usually improve their decision making culture with three alternative ways: either by imitating a successful organization, by importing new culture, or by fostering a revolution.

One might successfully copy new way of behaviour or best practice, but normally organization needs to create its knowledge by trial and error, since mimicking does not stick for longer term.

Importing new cultures is normal in military force when officers are rotated between different appointments spreading best in-house practises on way. This is possible is officers are provided room for initiative and change to ask WHY.

Revolutionary transformation usually requires both strong outside threat and inside will. Corporate behaviour is very slow to change especially within military organizations.

Road map for decision making does not state that swarming and self-synchronized way is better than hierarchical and information constraint way. Organizational culture and situation is dictating also the command and decision making style. Hierarchical culture does not support self-synchronizing and vice versa. 

This was the first writing in series of three papers on military knowledge management.

Evolution of military networking for support and mission environments

Abstract

This paper defines a road map that military networking technology has been following when providing services to support and mission networks. Paper starts with a phase when everything was connected by telephone. Then is covers two phases of providing more bandwidth. Further leap to connecting People and Things is described. A possible future is defined in connecting information. The networking road map is defined to help in ICT strategy work in defining current situation and journey to possible end state.

Introduction

Military Information and Communication Technology has evolved through decades in keeping the separation between networking, computing, information security and information management quire clear. Now evolution is reaching towards more convergent ICT structures and there is a special awareness needed to include these requirements into military ICT strategies.

This paper belongs in a series of papers that are describing the road maps of each technology layer especially in military support and mission networks as pictured in following figure 1.

Figure 1: Orientation for military ICT domains

This paper focuses on military support and mission networks like USA’s APAN[1], NIPRNET[2], SIPRNET[3] and NATO’s AMN[4], FMN[5]. This paper is not explaining Internet or evolution in governmental extranet nor in any military tactical networks.

This paper defines the major technical evolutionary path of each layer of technology and describes some short cuts that some military organisations have been able to take with more revolutionary goals. Paper provides tools to do strategic diagnosis by describing possible paths on both separate and integrated road map where interrelations and challenges may be easier identified.

Orientation to Military ICT road maps

There is a possibility to create a description of general evolution of Information and Communications Technology, ICT in military support and mission information environments. A generic evolution is depicted with four aligned roads of Networking, Computing, IT securing and Information Management in figure 2.

Figure 2: Roads of military CIT evolution

This paper is describing the sub-roadmap for military networking more in detail. See other sub-maps or description of all roads in other papers of ICT road maps by the same author.

Description of evolutionary path for Military Networking

Evolution of Military Networking in support and mission environments has seen the following stages illustrated in figure 2.

Simple connection and switching over telephone system

 The evolution of Networking in Military support and decision making started within garrison or camp by introduction of Private Automated Branch Exchange, PABX.

PABX provided all needed switching services for both voice and data.

Access was simple analogue subscriber line and later digital, DSL with either telephone apparatus for voice or modem for connecting computers.

PABX’s were connected to one another by transport network mainly based on Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy, PDH technology providing 2 Mbps digital trunks with E1 connection. If more was needed then E2 and E3 provided n-times E1 circuits.

Network was fixed and services were local.

Later exchanges become Integrated Services Digital Network, ISDN compatible and connections were baseband 2B+D which provided 2x64 kbps for communications + 32 kbps for signalling.

Wireless communications was enabled by professional trunk radio systems, first analogy and then digital.

Trunk encryption at E1 level provided site to site confidentiality and analogue/digital encryption devices attached to subscriber line or apparatus itself to provide end to end security.

Technicians specialised either PABX or PDH areas of technology.

Connecting sites with everything over E1 or STM 1

 As garrisons, camps and bases were utilising more computers and electronic devices, there was a need to have more bandwidth between sites. The core trunk network was updated by Synchronous Digital Hierarchy, SDH network that provided STM 1 base connection with 155 Mbps bandwidth. More 155 Mbps circuits were provided with STM 4, 16 and higher bandwidth.

Most network devices were attached by means of E1 or STM 1 connections and stable circuits were established between sites. Those devices were switches, routers, terminal servers, etc. and number and complexity of access configuration was increased.

Voice services were provided with advanced ISDN PBX’s but computers were connected with Local Area Network, LAN to Wide Area Network, WAN.

Usually each new system or new connection was established by allocating new circuit of either E1 or STM 1 level. This meant that new performance was quickly allocated but not effectively used.

WAN Data communications was developed with more powerful IP[6], NSA[7] or DECNET[8] routers, Asynchronous Transfer Mode cell switches or Fibre Channel, FC in Storage Area Networks, SAN. LAN bandwidth was increased from 10 Mbps Ethernet by 100 ME and FDDI to 100 Mbps gross speed. Wireless LAN access was introduced, but since communication people could not provide sufficient encryption and IT people were not interested to have encryption at session level, it was not popular in military organisations.

Terrestrial Trunked Radio, TETRA was introduced enabled by two competing standards TETRA 25 and TETRAPOL. It provided both push-to-talk (50 ms for circuit to be established) communications, normal mobile phone and short data messages. TETRA area networks replaced all smaller and incompatible trunk radios both in operations (Radio Access Tetra, RAATE network was installed in Kosovo IFOR operation 2002[9]) and within national defence (Finland implemented VIRVE, the nationwide TETRA network by 2002[10]).

Satellite communications were deployed to operations. Trunk connections were provided with n x E1 connections and end-user connections by satellite phones.

New area of speciality for computer networks was created. Sometimes this was divided into LAN technicians and WAN technicians.

More bandwidth between sites and complex switching systems

 As military sites become using even more systems and the bandwidth allocation was based on separate circuit, more performance from trunk network was needed. More bandwidth was provided with Wavelength Division Multiplexing, WDM, which introduced more than one optical wavelength within same optical fibre pair giving n x 2.5 Gbps performance by wavelength.

Data communications is using major part of bandwidth and trying to get more routed packet throughput by introducing Multiprotocol Label Switching, MPLS and Metro Ethernet or Carrier Ethernet which can provide over 1 GE bandwidths between sites. Further Ethernet bandwidth has grown over 100 GE.

Access interface has become simpler since Ethernet RJ-45 port is least expensive to manufacture. Thus devices from phone to printer are connected to Ethernet by RJ-45.

PBX has turned to VOIP server and telephone devices are connected to LAN. Specific telephone cabling has vanished. Almost all other special cabling is also replaced by Ethernet cabling or wireless connections. Only some old systems still needed synchrony provided by PDH E1 or SDH STM 1 interface.

Satellite systems were modified to provide IP connection both for trunk and end-user.

PBX and telephone technicians vanished from job descriptions. Network structure become too complex to manage locally and Network Management Centres took more responsibility of both change and configuration management.

Connecting users to services

 As mobility and areal connectivity become more important than connecting only fixed sites networks evolved to two main purposes: core networks for connecting data centres and access networks to keep users connected all times.

Core networks:

·         Large bandwidth provided by Metro Ethernet over WDM was utilised between data centres to fulfilling high-Quality of Service, QoS requirements inside and between server structures. Specially distributed storage was requiring both constant bandwidth and controlled delays and jitters.

·         Large clusters required availability and more real-time from connections

·         Metro Ethernet provided bandwidth and fixed connections

·         MPLS provided connections to different protocols with specific QoS requirements.

·         Trunk encryption was cost-effective between fixed data centres either at layer 2 or layer 1.

Access networks

·         Wired and wireless connections were trunked to one transparent access layer with mobile IP protocol. End user device was able to roam from one medium to another without need to change the configuration on run.

·         LAN structure vanished from sites since there were no local services left. Points of connection were managed at areal level and access mediums were simplified.

·         Copper wires vanished from local sites and were substituted by fibre or wireless connections.

·         Physical access was simplified to RJ-45 connection and layer 2 protocol was Ethernet.

·         Typical access network in international operations was a combination of WiFi-connections within camp, IP-radio connections where practical and Satellite IP-connections where terrestrial connections did not reached. In some operations local 3G connections were applied also as cost-effective alternative to satellite.

·         Access connections encryption was integrated with Mobile IP implementation and done at session level.

Collaboration applications took over from VOIP phones. Audio and video services were integrated into IT terminals as applications.

Legacy technologies such as PDH, SDH, ATM, FDDI, FC and 100E vanished from networking technology map together with people that could not find new competence.

TETRA was substituted with wireless IP connections and computer telephone integration applications that were providing required push-to-talk connections.

Connecting information

 With Software Defined Networking, SDN both core networks and access networks become more flexible and transparent.

Core networks:

·         Network, Storage and Process integration that did already happen within Data Centre are extending to core WAN in similar way.

·         Over 100 GE connections are implemented between data centres sometimes directly over wavelength and with full connected networks that do not have connection level routing or relinking.

·         Connecting data centres become less important when connecting structured information items is providing more value.

·         New kinds of QoS parameters are used to connect information to information.

Access networks:

·         With Software Defined Radio and virtual antenna technologies access networks become more integrated. There is no clear division any more between civilian waveforms and military waveforms and their use in access networks. Waveforms are becoming independent of hardware, which is ending the monopoly of military radio device makers. Waveforms are becoming more important assets since they are portable from one hardware to another.

·         Access connection and peer-to-peer connection are converging. Networks are defined more ad hoc with zero configuration. More complex features are implemented at higher protocol layers since multi-medium connections are used.

·         Wireless becomes major access method both locally and in area of operation to enable full access to information while mobile.

Encryption specifies further to core and access. Core trunk encryption is after bandwidth and less delay whereas access and peer-to-peer is focusing higher layers, ad hoc and seamless operation. Encrypting at communications level is gradually vanishing since information items will have individual encryption.

There will be many other networks between Things in each specific platform like vehicles, VAN and people, PAN.

Networking technology experts are divided further to core and access specialists.

Figure 3: A Roadmap of Military Computing for Support and Mission networks

Leaps, shortcuts and revolutionary paths on networking map of possible roads

Military organizations have followed the very evolutionary path but also made some leaps, even revolutionary, by stepping over several stages. There are two longer leaps in evolutionary path that need extra effort:

1.    From connecting sites to users with services

·         Connecting sites is very deep in military and also in teleoperator culture. It takes extra effort to change network operator from very site connector to provide areal access connections and special core network services for data only.

·         There is big cultural leap from telephone device to any data terminal having audio and video services. Fortunately civilian evolution supports this transformation and younger generations are not requiring telephone apparatus to be able to call each other.

·         Finland’s Defense Forces ICT rationalization program 2004 – 2007 achieved to jump from connecting sites to connecting people and things.[11]

2.    From connecting Things to connecting information with information

·         Software Defined Networking is vanishing further boundaries between communications experts and IT experts. With converging management tools both networking, computing and storing becomes one infrastructure and requires new level of experts.

·         With information centered computing and information management all old principles of connecting Sites, connecting People and connecting Things are replaced by connecting Semantic and Intelligent Information.

·         There is no information that any military has succeeded in this leap. Sweden tried to take this path when they started their Revolution of Military Affairs early 2000.[12]

There are few possibilities for revolutionary shortcuts as follows:

·         There is possibility to jump from connecting sites to providing core and access connection services.

o   This means configuring existing networks and creating more centrally controlled access networks.

o   There is a need for courage to get rid of all unnecessary stacks of frames and protocols.

·         There is a possibility to jump over cloud and access networking directly to software defined networking.

o   Major enabler is new structure for information management.

o   Without transforming all information as semantic and structured, there is no way that neither networking nor computing may achieve in this leap.

Conclusion

When military have owned their transport networks, they have been as effected by evolution of commercial technology and business models of civilian teleoperators as when having all networking services provided by teleoperators. Military have been struggling with inability to act on evolving world and new user requirements from following the comfortable path of existing topology and just add more bandwidth.

The transformation from telecommunication networks to datacommunication networks has affected also military and caused low cost-effectiveness in using available bandwidth for years. Military organizations have had challenges in retraining their technical people as speed of evolution has removed aging technology with exponentially increasing pace.

As any other tele communications operator, military has had challenges to follow revolution in computing and data communications. Legacy ITU-T[13] engineering models have not survived under the pressure of more agile IETF[14] solutions.

Since there are few military that still own or have control over their transportation networks, it is imperative to see through the full stack of technology layers and try to align their development. This will give more capability out from investment and help in integrating different cultures of telecommunication and information technology.