Information Sharing Among Military Headquarters: The Effects on Decisionmaking

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 assesses the effects of collaboration across alternative information network structures in carrying out a time-critical task, identifies the benefits and costs of local collaboration, and looks at how ‘information overload’ affects a system.