Speech acts of war

The British Army currently embraces a manoeuvrist style of command and hopes to gain further operational advantages from network enabled capability (NEC) and effects-based planning (EBP). Many new communications equipments are being procured. Existing approaches to military simulation modeling have, for good reasons, not concentrated on command and control (C2), but this is now changing. The author proposes an approach to the modeling of military command systems based on Searle's theory of speech acts, and suggests that it may have broader application than modeling C2 alone.