Key potential-oriented criticality analysis for complex military organization based on FINC-E model

The complex social organizations, which can self-organize into the region “at the edge of chaos”, neither too ordered nor too random, now have become an interdisciplinary research topic. As a kind of special social organization, the complex military organization usually has its key entities and relations, which should be well protected in case of attacks. In order to do the criticality analysis for the military organization, finding the key entities or relations which can disrupt the functions of the organization, two problems should be seriously considered. First, the military organization should be well modeled, which can work well in the specialized military context; secondly it is critical to define and identify the key entities or relations, which should incorporate the topological centrality and weighted nodes or edges. Different from the traditional military organizations which are usually task-oriented, this paper proposes the Force, Intelligence, Networking, and C2 Extended (FINC-E) Model for complex military organization, with which a more detailed and quantitative analysis for the military organization is available. This model provides the formal representation for the nodes and edges in the military organization, which provides a highly efficient and concise network topology. In order to identify the critical nodes and edges, a method based on key potential is proposed, which acts as the measurement of criticality for the heterogeneous nodes and edges in the complex military organization. The key potential is well defined on the basis of topology structure and of the node’s or edge’s capability, which helps to transform the organization from the heterogeneity to the homogeneity. In the end, the criticality analysis case study is made for both small-world networked military organization and scale-free networked military organization, showing that the measure of key potential has the advantage over other classical measures in locating the key entities or relations for complex military organization.