Date of Award

Summer 2010

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering

Committee Director

Shannon Bowling

Committee Member

Resit Unal

Committee Member

Ghaith A. Rabadi

Committee Member

Sean Deller

Committee Member

Kerem Aytulun

Abstract

As Information Age changes the lifestyle of all humankinds, it also changes the way how to defense and secure the borders are secured and defended. The Information Age is about information superiority. It evolves the command and control concept, proactively, to optimize the size of the units and their connections within a combat force for effective mission accomplishment. The biggest issue is how big a unit will be and how they will arrange and connect it to the command and control structure in order for the unit to be effective on the battlefield. While some arrangements connect to each other so well that they endure and perform effectively during combat, other arrangements that connect each other are so cumbersome that they either barely succeed or are killed.

Network Centric Operations concentrate on how to provide a warfighting unit with enough assets so that it can accomplish the assigned mission by itself effectively within its chain of command. The first thing that Network Centric Operations tries to achieve is to gain the shared awareness of the battlefield. This can be done by scouts, ground or air patrol, satellite image, radio frequency, etc. The situational awareness and the information superiority of the battlefield will definitely effect the enemy's operations so that the enemy needs to change its strategy. The second thing that Network Centric Operations tries to achieve is to have an impact on every occasion being reported or unexpectedly sensed in order to disrupt the enemy's will. How can a force achieve this? A well organized and a well connected force can have the information superiority and be able to transform that superiority to a success. For effectiveness, each asset in a combat force should have reliable connection capacity with command and control centers and other assets.

The number of Sensors and Influencers being the driving entities of the war unit in the battlefield are integer-partitioned and connected to a Decider. There are well defined rules, regulations, and well established connections between the entities. They are initially placed random to the simulation environment as the BLUE and RED forces. Each force starts sensing, tracking, reporting, and killing the opposing side. Each force tries to win the other side. Each combination of an experiment replicates 30 times and then results are reported. The probability of a BLUE force win was studied to measure the performance of a networked force.

The objectives of this research are to explore how units vary in size of organization, how they behave in a networked environment and to investigate how to increase the performance of a networked force. This research explores sufficient search space to understand the influence of network factors on Network Centric Operations.

DOI

10.25777/bgyr-kt71

ISBN

9781124291550

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