In an effort to improve the channel utilization of a warship combat system (WCS), it is necessary to control and manage the large volume of video traffic by considering a strong self-similarity characteristic. We propose a new video traffic management method for the WCS that smooths the traffic of the closed-circuit television surveillance system (CSS) video and encodes the electro-optical tracking system (EOTS) video with low complexity in real time. First, to achieve global and local traffic smoothing for the CSS video traffic, a proper bandwidth allocation interval and a minimum bandwidth for the CSS video traffic must be determined. Second, due to the increased available bandwidth after traffic smoothing, more elaborate low-delay encoding is accomplished by selecting encoding modes adaptively to compress the EOTS video efficiently with high visual quality. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to control the WCS traffic to be as flat as possible and to encode the EOTS video with low delay, even in combat and emergency scenarios. Hence, we show that to migrate to network-centric warfare successfully, the proposed method is much more suitable for the WCS than conventional video traffic management.