Heart of ForceNet: Sensor Grid, Advanced Command and Control

Sea Power, Mar 2004 by Tomaszeski, Steven J

Never before has such a large quantity and broad scope of information been available instantaneously to the warfare commander. The impact of this fact cannot be overstated; it is transforming the way we conduct war.

The challenge is to provide operational commanders and mission planners the ability to readily access and manage the massive quantities of information that are now available to them.

In Joint Vision 2020, the Department of Defense's strategic plan to ensure battlespace dominance in the 21st century, a key element is information superiority enabled by emerging technologies and interoperability between U.S. and coalition forces to produce a family of Common Operational Tactical Pictures (COTP). A COTP is a presentation of timely, fused, relevant information, tailored to meet the needs of the joint force and common to every organization in the joint operation. It offers mission commanders the ability to display and share an extensive database of relevant knowledge on a laptop computer.

The goal is tactical knowledge. It starts with raw data, which is processed into useable information. That information then is applied to the tactical scenario to produce knowledge. For instance, one of the Navy's fleet of hydrographie survey ships performs a bottom survey of a strategically significant coast. The output is raw data from the ship's side-scan sonar. The data is processed at the Naval Oceanographic Office's Warfare Support Center to produce a bathymetric assessment of the slope of the beach, which by itself constitutes information. When this information is applied to the requirements of landing craft in an amphibious assault, it becomes tactically significant knowledge. And that means increased combat power.

An important aspect of information superiority is situational awareness. This implies knowing where you are, where allied and coalition forces are and where enemy forces are. It means understanding the environment, from the sea floor to the top of the atmosphere. It means knowing how the situation is changing over time. It implies an accuracy that allows close maneuvering of surface ships, submarines, aircraft, manned and unmanned vehicles, and ground troops, as well as the accurate delivery of precision ordnance. It uses information gleaned from autonomous sensor systems, intelligence and on-scene observations, placed in a standard geospatial context and displayed on interactive, user-friendly and interoperable data displays and decision aids. Ultimately, situational awareness includes everything that will impact the successful completion of the objective.

This is not new, of course. Military commanders have always needed to consider these things. When Agamemnon led the Greek forces in the siege of Troy, he needed to know the exact location of his archers, cavalry and foot soldiers; the location of Trojan defenses and the range of their archers; where the supply ships were; what the terrain was like around the objective... and when the fields would be dry enough to move his giant wooden horse!

The need for accurate, up-to-the-minute information has not changed. But in modern warfare, joint air, land, sea, amphibious, special operations and space forces move with decisive speed and overwhelming operational tempo. Highly lethal and precise high-tech weapon systems are released from over the horizon. And asymmetric threats can totally change the order of battle. Decisions have to be made quickly, supported by a rapid-fire information process. The amount of information readily available to the mission commander, and the timeliness of that information, has increased by magnitudes. The challenge is to allow him to extract the information he needs from the mass of available data, to make it easily accessible, timely, accurate and useable by other allied forces.

ForceNet will meet that challenge. To provide the required wide-area network connectivity to our dispersed forces, a family of advanced multiband satellite terminals will dramatically increase bandwidth availability to enable the infusion and transference of essential data. These terminals will offer operational commanders sufficient flexibility to be compatible with all existing and future satellite and communications constellations.

An Expeditionary Sensor Grid will provide persistent battlespace sensing through manned, unmanned and unattended sensors to provide a wide range of data necessary to characterize the battlespace. This will include intelligence on the disposition and movement of enemy forces as well as real-time environmental information. Meteorological, oceanographic and terrain data from satellite imagery, tactical radar, autonomous unmanned vehicles, data buoys and high-capacity computing capabilities will provide a critical tactical advantage to decision makers.

Sophisticated tactical decision aids are being continuously developed and refined to assist in the processing of data. For example, the Expeditionary Decision Support System was developed to be an amphibious warfare planning segment on the shipboard Global Command and Control System - Maritime (GCCS-M). It is designed to integrate with other related segments such as charting programs, communications handlers, imagery servers, databases, etc.