Dynamic Decision - Making and Military Communications Systems in the Information Age

The art of making timely, accurate and dynamic decisions has been the most critical aspect of militmy leadership, since the decisions taken by militmy leaders at all levels most often have direct impact on human lives, national assets and at times survival of the nations. Traditionally, militaries world over have well defined (and at times rigid) hierarchical, organizational structure. Decision-making process in such organizations generally remains manual, leader oriented, rigid, simple and at times slow. Given the inherent organisational strength, integrity and courage of military leaders and sincerity of purpose across the organisation the process has so far been somewhat successful albeit at higher costs. However, the ground realities today have vastly changed. These changes are in the field of:

New concepts of national and individual security, which has enlarged the scope and domain of armed forces.

Revolutionwy progress in software technology, networked information system.

Growing convergence between IT. communication and content.

All this makes it incumbent on the modern armies to review their decision-making process. An attempt has been made in this paper to present an overview of decision-making proces in deJence structure using the modern tools of IT, identify the trends in the militwy information systems and highlight the necessity of their convergence. The objective of the paper is thus to examine dynamic decision making process in modern armed forces and focus on the necessity of convergence between IT enabled decision-making tools, networked military information systems in the backdrop of varying combat environment.