"The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is investing heavily in information systems to support net-centric military capabilities and joint operations. With such programs as Global Information Grid Bandwidth Expansion (GIG-BE), Transformational Satellite Communications Systems (TSAT), Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), and Net Centric Enterprise Services (NCES), DOD is creating a global information backbone and striving to get useful bandwidth and information services to the warfighter. After declining in the 1990s, spending on communications and intelligence has grown by 50 percent since 2001. Yet, the investment in networks still is not enough to harness the full power of information for national defense ... if DOD aligns economic power with the joint community (the customer) in its processes; embraces the goals of deep integration, unobstructed access, and unbounded collaboration; draws the IT industry into its market; and elevates the role of the CIO, it can exploit the new user-responsive technologies and take a major leap forward in information integration, which is critical to a truly net-centric force."--Page 3.

Examines how the United States should improve its counterinsurgency (COIN) capabilities through, for example, much greater focus on understanding jihadist strategy, using civil measures to strengthen the local government, and enabling local forces to conduct COIN operations. Provides a broad discussion of the investments, organizational changes, and multilateral arrangements that the United States should pursue to improve its COIN capabilities.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is investing heavily in information systems to support net-centric military capabilities and joint operations. With such programs as Global Information Grid Bandwidth Expansion (GIG-BE), Transformational Satellite Communications Systems (TSAT), Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), and Net Centric Enterprise Services (NCES), DOD is creating a global information backbone and striving to get useful bandwidth and information services to the warfighter. After declining in the 1990s, spending on communications and intelligence has grown by 50 percent since 2001. Yet, the investment in networks still is not enough to harness the full power of information for national defense.

Militaries with state-of-the-art information technology sometimes bog down in confusing conflicts. To understand why, it is important to understand the micro-foundations of military power in the information age, and this is exactly what Jon R. Lindsay's Information Technology and Military Power gives us. As Lindsay shows, digital systems now mediate almost every effort to gather, store, display, analyze, and communicate information in military organizations. He highlights how personnel now struggle with their own information systems as much as with the enemy. Throughout this foray into networked technology in military operations, we see how information practice—the ways in which practitioners use technology in actual operations—shapes the effectiveness of military performance. The quality of information practice depends on the interaction between strategic problems and organizational solutions. Information Technology and Military Power explores information practice through a series of detailed historical cases and ethnographic studies of military organizations at war. Lindsay explains why the US military, despite all its technological advantages, has struggled for so long in unconventional conflicts against weaker adversaries. This same perspective suggests that the US retains important advantages against advanced competitors like China that are less prepared to cope with the complexity of information systems in wartime. Lindsay argues convincingly that a better understanding of how personnel actually use technology can inform the design of command and control, improve the net assessment of military power, and promote reforms to improve military performance. Warfighting problems and technical solutions keep on changing, but information practice is always stuck in between.

This book represents the results of cross-fertilization between OR/MS and CS/AI. It is this interface of OR/CS that makes possible advances that could not have been achieved in isolation. Taken collectively, these articles are indicative of the state-of-the-art in the interface between OR/MS and CS/AI and of the high caliber of research being conducted by members of the INFORMS Computing Society.