Impact of security properties on the quality of information in tactical military networks

The goal of a tactical military network is to provide information superiority over an opposing force. This information superiority increases mission tempo if the information can be used to make correct decisions within time constraints. To achieve this goal, a sufficient amount of information must be received with a required quality. The information quality implicitly accounts for the level of security provided. In this paper we examine the dependencies between security and other factors that affect the information quality. We incorporate the notion of the amount of information of sufficient quality received over time as the operational information content capacity. We discuss the complex tradeoffs that arise while providing security properties: the decision maker may require certain security properties to use information, but the provision of such properties may degrade the ability of the network to deliver the required amount of information in time, thus lowering the operational information content capacity of the network.