"National Security Research Division."

"This research was conducted within RAND Europe and the International Security and Defense Policy Center of the RAND National Security Research Division ... In the UK, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) directed the work and participated in the research effort."--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-122).

Introduction -- Decisions in a Network -- Representing Uncertainty -- The Effects of Collaboration -- The Effects of Complexity -- Conclusion.

Military commanders work within stressful and fast-changing circumstances and need to understand the complexities of decisionmaking in intricate networks. New concepts such as network-centric operations and distributed and decentralised command and control have been suggested as technologically enabled replacements for platform-centric operations and for centralised command and control in military operations. But as attractive as these innovations may seem, they must be tested before adoption. This report, conducted by a joint US/UK team, proposes a theoretical method to assess the effects of information gathering and collaboration across an information network on military decisions taken by a group of local decisionmakers. The authors use the Rapid Planning Process and previous work on the effects of network-centric warfare to analyse the quality of decisions in an alternative structure. Specifically, they assess the effects of collaboration across alternative information network structures in carrying out a time-critical task, identify the benefits and costs of local collaboration using a relationship based on information entropy, and look at how a multitude of unneeded information, or "information overload", affects a system.

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