Today’s armed forces are lagging behind their civilian counterparts when it comes to data sharing. Air Power Association President, Air Marshal (ret’d) Greg Bagwell CB CBE, examines the new demands put on air power in the information age.
Column
Commander’s Update Briefing


Militaries around the world love their acronyms and the area of information and data management is particularly rich in them. In the last decade or so, we have seen IW (information warfare), NEC (networkenabled capability) and NCW (network-centric warfare), to name but a few. Each has tried to evoke the simple concept of the passage of information on the battlefield, where ‘information dominance’ is seen as the key to victory in increasingly complex and contested scenarios. But rather than each one heralding a quantum shift in performance, the reason the acronym has had to be constantly reinvented is to reinvigorate the concept when reality fails to meet the vision.