Network-Centric Concepts: Impacts to Distributed Fusion System Design

The history of network-centric concepts in the United States can be said to go back at least to the mid-1980s when the US Defense Department was reorganized under the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 that imputed the notions of “jointness” onto US defense and military operations. A sequence of publications evolved that introduced the notions of net-centricity and eventually the military notion of network-centric warfare (NCW), in which the strong informational dependency persisted. The term has been extended by the business community to apply to broadly based, multi-organizational processes under the phrase “value network, " which seems to be particularly applicable to service industries and processes involving nontangible components and products. The value chain in the NCW case is descriptive of the interdependencies among, and value contributions of, the links from network-centric organizations and improved information processes-and information products-to more effective mission outcomes.