Curbing Innovation: How Command Technology Limits Network Centric Warfare (2004) By Alfred Kaufman
 
 Dr Alfred Kaufman has written a stimulating and unorthodox book. He argues that US defense planning has gone wrong since the end of the Cold War, and he makes some provocative suggestions about how to put things right. Along the way, he provides an extended critique of Network Centric Warfare. Dr Kaufman borrowed the phrase "Command Technology" from Chicago historian William McNeill. McNeill uses it to refer to "a special relationship between defense officials and inventors." The officials say what they want a weapon to do; the inventors to come up with designs. Kaufman uses the phrase as a label for a "means of controlling [military] technological innovation". For Kaufman the heart of the challenge in "Command Technology" is to design weapons "that will reflect ... our national security interests, not the natural instincts of the technological community." In his view, the US has relied on two related mechanisms to do so, for most of the period since World War II. The first was the planning scenario that envisioned war with the Soviet Union. The second mechanism was "Systems Analysis." Dr Kaufman uses this phrase to refer to the set of practices imported to the Pentagon under Robert McNamara.
 
Soft Cover
145 pages
In Good Condition