A Proposed Framework for Network-Centric Maritime Warfare Analysis

The benefits of network-centric warfare are addressed in many publications, but few of these publications actually demonstrate how to quantify these alleged benefits. This report proposes an analytical framework to quantify the value-added of network-centric warfare; that framework is queueing theory, which is based on the concept of a demand-for-service process. Most warfare tasks can be characterized as demand-for-service processes. This report shows how queueing theory can be applied to demand-for-service warfare tasks and thus provide the basis for analyzing and quantifying those tasks. In addition, this report demonstrates how the functions of many of the independent and dependent variables and associated warfare metrics can be translated into the characteristics and metrics of queues.