January 22, 2003: Pentagon Official Discusses Importance of ‘Network Centric Warfare’

Arthur Cebrowski, Director of the Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation, gives a speech to the Network Centric Warfare 2003 conference. He talks about the US military’s efforts to transform itself from a military focused on state vs. state wars to one that can deal with the new realities of the 21st century where power exists at the “larger system level” and violence has moved “downwards to the individual level.” Central to the process of transformation, Cebrowski explains, is the need to move from a static platform-based hierarchical structure into a dynamic network-based peer-to-peer structure. This approach, known as “Network Centric Warfare,” amounts to an entirely “new theory of warfare,” he says. [Transformation Trends, 2/17/2003 ; New York Times, 11/13/2004]