ABSTRACT
As the defense community has continued to move toward increasingly complex weapon systems that must support joint and coalition operations, the need for system of systems (SoS) engineering becomes more critical to the achievement of military capabilities. The need for SoS-enabled mission capabilities has led to changes in policy for the acquisition of systems and the assemblage of battle forces. The decade of the 1990s was a time of transition for coalition defense systems, and especially so for US defense systems. The role of the human in an SoS can be part of the overall design, but it could also equally result from a lack of adequate interfaces to support the interactions of the systems. The development of military concepts related to the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) raises the question of whether the RMA is based on SoS or is driven by network enablement.
