Introduction

It is quite evident that, while all sane people desire peace, all countries must practically provide for their self-defense. Thus, issues of procurement and implementation of combat systems must be objectively analyzed. When performing such analyses, it is useful and important to distinguish between specific combat components (‘anatomy’) and the Command, Control and Communications (C3) functions (‘physiology’) of these systems. If enormous financial and human resources must indeed be spent on a specific weapons system, then C3 models can offer procurement decision aids to spending these resources more efficiently. However, even before procuring specific weapon components, C3 models should be used to develop battle-management decision aids to help determine if it is feasible to consider building planned large-scale systems at all.

Even without agreement on just what C3 is, there is widespread criticism that we do not spend enough on C3 relative to what we spend on specific weapons systems (Blair, 1985). The Eastport Study Group (Eastport Study Group, 1985) has made this issue its primary concern with regard to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program. There is also an everpresent problem of weighing the political and military aspects between the hierarchical and distributed designs of C3, the former being politically desirable and appropriate for deterministic or modestly stochastic operations, and the latter being more appropriate for severely stochastic systems (Orr, 1983).