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The European NATO allies are beginning to field network-enabled capabilities which are seen as a pre-requisite for a true Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) capability. Following the November 2002 Prague Summit, the Europeans learnt that NCW will be the key strategy for 21st century warfare. Gen. Wolfgang Schneiderhan, Chief of Staff German Armed Forces, stated that NCW is a great challenge to interlink forces and exchange battlefield information from one force to another rather than being pushed to the near-obsolescent concept of the "Combined Weapons Battle". Meanwhile, the NATO Network Enabled Capability (NNEC) carried out by the NATO C3 Agency (NC3A) is a further step towards a network-centric approach.
The idea of NCW is to collect intelligence for rapid processing, analysis, and interpretation and to share timely battlespace information between decision-makers at all command levels and the individual warfighter. NCW promises superiority in weapons systems' efficacy through the rapid distribution of information to each position within a theatre of operation. This is being achieved by distributing intelligence which is gathered by a multiplicity of highly advanced sensors carried by various platforms.
Much of the character of 21st century warfare will therefore be dominated by information warfare and long-range precision strike coupled with command and control. As it was widely stressed at the second Conference on European Defence held in Berlin last December, the European Armed Forces are now beginning to understand this strategy for present day and future joint warfare.
European Force Modernisation and C4ISR
In the present situation, European Armed Forces are effectively unable to count on a fast, accurate, and continual flow of Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR) data around the clock, this being due both to interoperability problems and the lack of longrange ISR platforms. This gap between US and European capabilities has been clearly outlined during the 2002 Afghan campaign, when armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were seen for the first time functioning together with manned aircraft and operating jointly with fused sensors over the battlefield. Also, the "War on Terror" shows that NCW can bring information superiority to the forces and allows them to close the sensor-to-shooter cycle.
Several European nations that are now moving towards NCW see the sensor fusion concept as the principal capability. It is generally agreed that...