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This book addresses an important but little-noticed phenomenon in the revolutionary world of military technology. Across a wide range of otherwise-unrelated weapons programs, the Pentagon is now pursuing arms that are deliberately crafted to be less powerful, less deadly, and less destructive than the systems they are designed to supplement or replace. This direction is historically anomalous; military forces generally pursue ever-bigger bangs, but the modern conditions of counter-insurgency warfare and military operations 'other than war' (such as peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance) demand a military capable of modulated force. By providing a capacity to intervene deftly yet effectively, the new generations of 'useable' weaponry should enable the U.S. military to accomplish its demanding missions in a manner consistent with legal obligations, public relations realities, and political constraints. Five case studies are provided, regarding precision-guided 'smart bombs', low-yield nuclear weapons, self-neutralizing anti-personnel land mines, directed-energy anti-satellite weapons, and non-lethal weapons.

History and deployment of smart weapons. In the United States, efforts to develop precision guided munitions—PGMs—began during the First World War and resulted in an 'aerial torpedo' by the 1920s. While World War II was dominated by large-scale strategic bombing—essentially throwing out tons of free-falling munitions in the hope they hit something important—both sides in the war worked to develop airborne munitions that could be steered toward a target. However after that war, U.S. national security policy focused on the atomic bomb, hardly a weapon that needed to be directed with accuracy. The cost of emphasis on atomic weapons was revealed in the general unsuitability of American tactics and weapons deployment systems during the Vietnam War. Lessons learned in that conflict, coupled with rapid technological developments in aerodynamics, lasers, and solid-state electronics, brought air power dramatically closer to the "surgical strike" now seen as crucial to modern warfare. New technology created attractive choices and options for American policymakers as well as field commanders, and events in the Arab-Israeli wars, the U.S. raid on Libya, and most dramatically in the first Gulf War created an ever-increasing demand for the precision weapons. The prospect of pinpoint delivery of weapons right to the enemy's door by speeding aircraft seems to presage war in which the messy and politically risky deployment of ground troops is unnecessary. The potential of such weapons, and their strategic limitations, made the Gulf War and Iraqi War living theater for assessing what such weapons can and cannot do and have important implications for planning for future warfare.

he first overview of US NC3 since the 1980s, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications explores the current NC3 system and its vital role in ensuring effective deterrence, contemporary challenges posed by cyber threats, new weapons technologies, and the need to modernize the United States' Cold War-era system of systems.

Wide-ranging changes have been made to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) since 2006, when the binational agreement was signed in perpetuity. NORAD traces the joint command's recent history - one marked by technological and structural innovations, but also by unprecedented threats and challenges.

This is the first book to explore information management at sea as practiced by the U.S. Navy from the Civil War to World War II. The brain of a modern warship is its combat information center (CIC). Data about friendly and enemy forces pour into this nerve center, contributing to command decisions about firing, maneuvering, and coordinating. Timothy S. Wolters has written the first book to investigate the history of the CIC and the many other command and control systems adopted by the U.S. Navy from the Civil War to World War II. What institutional ethos spurred such innovation? Information at Sea tells the fascinating stories of the naval and civilian personnel who developed an array of technologies for managing information at sea, from signal flares and radio to encryption machines and radar. Wolters uses previously untapped archival sources to explore how one of America's most technologically oriented institutions addressed information management before the advent of the digital computer. He argues that the human-machine systems used to coordinate forces were as critical to naval successes in World War II as the ships and commanders more familiar to historians.

Defense planning faces significant uncertainties. This report applies robust decision making (RDM) to the air-delivered munitions mix challenge. RDM is quantitative, decision support methodology designed to inform decisions under conditions of deep uncertainty and complexity. This proof-of-concept demonstration suggests that RDM could help defense planners make plans more robust to a wide range of hard-to-predict futures.

One of the most impressive computer systems ever was the vacuum tube based behemoth AN/FSQ-7, which was the heart of the ''Semi Automatic Ground Environment''. Machines of this type were children of the Cold War and had a tremendous effect in politics. They also generated a vast amount of spin-offs which still shape our world. This book focuses on the technological achievements and details of this marvelous machine and of its predecessor Whirlwind. The various developments, ranging from magnetic core memory to data transmission via telephone lines, are covered in detail with schematics, circuit descriptions and small programming examples. This book is a treasure trove for those interested in the technology of early digital computers and those interested in the impact these machines had and still have on our current computer systems.

This book addresses an important but little-noticed phenomenon in the revolutionary world of military technology: the pursuit of arms that are deliberately crafted to be less powerful, less deadly, and less destructive than previous systems. By providing a capacity to intervene deftly yet effectively, 'usable' weaponry will allow the military to accomplish its missions under legal obligations, in accordance to public relations realities, and under political constraints.

Conventional prompt global strike (CPGS) is a military option under consideration by the U.S. Department of Defense. This book, the final report from the National Research Council's Committee on Conventional Prompt Global Strike Capability, analyzes proposed CPGS systems and evaluates the potential role CPGS could play in U.S. defense. U.S. Conventional Prompt Global Strike provides near-, mid-, and long-term recommendations for possible CPGS development, addressing the following questions: Does the United States need CPGS capabilities? What are the alternative CPGS systems, and how effective are they likely to be if proposed capabilities are achieved? What would be the implications of alternative CPGS systems for stability, doctrine, decision making, and operations? What nuclear ambiguity concerns arise from CPGS, and how might they be mitigated? What arms control issues arise with CPGS systems, and how might they be resolved? Should the United States proceed with research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) of the Conventional Trident Modification (CTM) program5 and, ultimately, with CTM production and deployment? Should the United States proceed with the development and testing of alternative CPGS systems beyond CTM?

Owing to the expansion of network-centric operating concepts across the Department of Defense (DOD) and the growing threat to information and cybersecurity from lone actors, groups of like-minded actors, nation-states, and malicious insiders, information assurance is an area of significant and growing importance and concern. Because of the forward positioning of both the Navy's afloat and the Marine Corps expeditionary forces, IA issues for naval forces are exacerbated, and are tightly linked to operational success. Broad-based IA success is viewed by the NRC's Committee on Information Assurance for Network-Centric Naval Forces as providing a central underpinning to the DOD's network-centric operational concept and the Department of the Navy's (DON's) FORCEnet operational vision. Accordingly, this report provides a view and analysis of information assurance in the context of naval 'mission assurance'.