Analyzing the Effects of Network Centric Warfare on Warfighter Empowerment

NCW is a conceptual warfighting paradigm that seeks to exploit the advantages of information technologies to develop information superiority, leading to battlefield awareness and later escalating to battlefield dominance during future military operations. While military forces are currently experimenting within the framework of this new concept, efforts are being made to harness the opportunities made available by implementing network-centric concepts to increased operational efficiency and enhance combat power effectiveness so that optimal desired results may be achieved. However, the modern Marine Corps is comfortable and quite successful implementing its current, subordinate empowering doctrine of Maneuver Warfare, which emphasis the human behavioral aspects of warfare over technology implementation. The issue, then, is: how will Marine Corps warfighting performance be affected by changes in doctrine driven by advances in and the implementation of technology. This thesis seeks to answer this question through exploratory research of theoretical concepts on organizational performance, an examination of current and future warfighting concepts, and an assessment of the practicality of successfully implementing future warfighting concepts based upon the principles of a theoretical framework. Recommendations are provided for creation of a metric that will adequately assess the performance of empowered warfighters in a Network Centric Warfare environment.