Synchronized chaos: visualization, integration, and dynamic thinking - military intelligence

Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, Jan-March, 2003 by Stephen K. Iwicki

"see First, Understand First, Act First, Finish Decisively"

--Objective Force Concept

Across the spectrum of operations, intelligence is a dynamic and exciting endeavor. It involves interactions with many different organizations, systems, data networks, and most importantly people. The intriguing dynamic nature of the profession feeds life to the intelligence process and its people. As we enter transformation with a heavier reliance on automated systems, we must concentrate on developing free-thinking analysts rather than machine operators. We must recognize that it is the interaction of the human brain with the many different automated tools as well as with other analysts that allows us to make accurate assessments that support the decision-makers.

Our Army, our military, and our nation are undergoing a massive operational transformation as a result of significant international and domestic events over the last five years. The developments associated with our military's transformation efforts are forcing us to make major cultural changes in the way we perform intelligence operations. These factors challenge us to change the ways we visualize and present information, synchronize operations, and train the people who perform these critical missions.

Objective Force mission accomplishment and survivability depend heavily on accurate intelligence and reliable communications networks to enable rapid standoff engagements to destroy the enemy. Our Objective Force goals of near-perfect intelligence, high situation understanding, and timely, accurate targeting are critical if we are going to minimize the number of force-on-force fights. We must enable our units to maneuver out of contact while maintaining their situational understanding. It will be the Unit of Action (UA) (brigade of today) Commander's responsibility to synchronize all of these moving pieces, including information management, on a scale we have never seen before.

Our intelligence mission will be driven by the need for accurate databases. Graphics and text are the outputs of our analysis, but databases represent a large portion of the path to those products and as a result drive all of our visualization systems. Databases are essential to in-depth analysis, predictive assessments, time-sensitive targeting, and situational development for 0-96 hours. As intelligence professionals, our mission is to go beyond 'CNN-type situation reporting" and identify trends and predict future enemy operations. While this type of product is often presented graphically, its analysis is based on historical tracking and link and nodal analysis, as well as the fusion and retention power of our individual analysts. If a unit does not take the time to build data libraries, there will be no historical research capability, and this will lead to flawed analysis.

The Army is making great strides as we transform to the Objective Force. More and more of our systems are continuing to achieve better connectivity towards creating the Common Operational Picture (COP). As a result, we are collecting more pieces of information that come to us over a growing variety of automated systems, communications networks, and data formats. If left unmanaged, we surrender increased situation awareness capabilities to chaos. The key to our current and future success is to synchronize the flow of intelligence to keep it alive, channeled to the right places, and constantly adjusting focus to meet the changing needs of our commanders. There are three steps necessary to achieve this basic goal: visualization, integration, and dynamic thinking.

Visualization: Developing and Monitoring with Interpretive Tools

Visualization is a term we loosely throw around in casual conversation without much thought. Most people equate visualization with sitting in front of a bank of monitors watching several visual feeds. Visualization is far more complex and begins with defining the scope of the problem and the commander's intent. This is our starting point for developing a common understanding of the situation and the direction we want to proceed.

We fuse our intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) factors (enemy, friendly, and environment) to form the basis of the COP. Next we add our operational plan to broadly define the future situation and identify what we must accomplish to meet our objectives. Finally, we must communicate and display this "picture" so that the staff and subordinate commanders understand a shared vision. This is the critical starting point for all visualization efforts. It is difficult to achieve when the commander and staff are collocated. We are about to further complicate this endeavor by adding the new dimension of networked collaborative analysis ventures under the Objective Force operating concepts. Now that we have started the process by creating in effect a static COP, we must move forward and put our visualization process in motion. We must collect the information available to us and determine which data sources we can have pushed to us, which we must pull, and which ones we may only be capable of observing. Th e dimensions of "Push, Pull, Observe" will change dramatically as we move from the Legacy Force to the Interim Force and finally reach the Objective Force.