ISSUE 182 : Jul/Aug - 2010 - Australian Defence Force Journal

The authors’ chief vulnerability is in choosing SA as their banner. In defining SA in termsof ‘activated knowledge’, they invite the question: ‘Why is the book not titled ‘DistributedActivated Knowledge’’? SA is a tiny pocket of epistemology and cognitive science but earnsits special place as a nexus between the real and abstract worlds—it talks to fighter pilots,principal warfare officers and others with the ‘right stuff ’, while being amenable to academicstudy. In particular, and as captured in the current-prevailing model of SA, the ‘right stuff ’ ismore than knowledge of where things are now; it is also about making accurate projectionsof where things are going to be. As presented, the propositional networks do not account forthese features and the authors do not justify the divergence.Similarly, the authors have not confronted those who would draw distinctions between whathumans do and what systems do. If SA can really be held by an artefact (such as a sensor),then why do ‘right stuff ’ personnel appear to have something more than the equipmentthey operate? While not all researchers will cross the bridge from human-centric to systemcentricSA, more may do so if they could be assured that vital aspects of SA were not beinglost. Finally, compatible SA between individuals is arguably only part of a system’s SA, in the‘distributed cognition’ sense described by Hitchins (and from which the book claims heritage).In drawing conclusions for systems design, the authors focus on supporting the needs ofskilled individuals within the system. If we accept the Hitchins thesis, we ought to be able tocontemplate cases where individual SA is poor, for the good of the overall system.Nonetheless, the book is a tantalising glimpse of how network-centric warfare (NCW) offerssomething genuinely novel, versus the mere scaling of historical concepts with moderncommunications. DSA theory points to new relationships between human and machineelements in the ADF as a system-of-systems, over and above the sharing of information.Ironically, while the potential from ‘new relationships’ was acknowledged in the 2005 and2007 editions of the ADF’s ‘NCW Roadmap’, this aspect was discarded in the 2009 edition. Thebook will thus interest concept developers seeking to turn the promise of NCW into enhancedoperational capability for the ADF. It will be a useful addition to libraries in military systemsengineering and human factors.Tales of War: great stories from military history forevery day of the yearW. B. Marsh and Bruce CarrickIcon Books: London, 2010ISBN: 978-1-8483-1074-2Reviewed by Dr Noel SprolesThis is one of those occasions when you may safely judge a book by its cover, for the titledescribes the contents of this book most succinctly. For each day of the year, approximatelytwo pages are devoted to a story connected to a historic military event that occurred on thatdate. Following each story is a list of other events that also occurred on the same date but indifferent years. A brief summary of one or two sentences accompanies each of these entries.105