First Honorable Mention, Marine Corps Essay Contest
The information age promises to revolutionize the military, if it can survive 1 January 2000. Joint Vision 2010, network-centric warfare, sensor-to-shooter, and common tactical picture (CTP) are just some of the buzz words that fill the air when information technology experts and military officials meet to discuss how to best support the warfighter, whether he is the theater commander or the squad leader. The possibilities are touted as a revolution; meanwhile, the world becomes unstable and uncertain.
An Unconventional Future
The echoes from the crash of the Iron Curtain have been with us for a decade now; some of them warn that the end of the Cold War has ushered in a multi-polar and uncertain international landscape. The Marine Corps has been conducting expeditionary operations in a just such a world for more than 200 years, but present trends indicate the global situation is about to get worse.
Although the world still poses a number of significant threats that could evolve into major contingencies, the most likely conflicts to confront the United States in the near term are smaller-scale contingencies. Expeditionary forces are likely to be involved in the laundry list of military operations other than war (MOOTW) against disorganized forces, such as petty criminals, vandals and looters, criminal and drug syndicates, militias, guerrillas, tribal entities, and terrorists as well as against regularly equipped and organized forces. Future opponents will engage U.S. forces asymmetrically, avoiding our industrial and technological strengths and confronting our perceived weaknesses. ' Thus, the Marine Corps must be prepared for unconventional operations.
Is Conventional Command and Control Adequate?
Just as the Cold War ended, two events occurred that had unfortunate consequences for our command-and-control systems: the United States expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the grand board game commonly known as Operation Desert Shield-Desert Storm, and information technology came of age. Success in the Cold War and in the desert against Iraq reinforced the paradigm of conventional warfare and gave it an undue influence on military command-and-control systems being designed for a future that promises to be dominated by military operations other than war—unconventional warfare.
The Common Tactical Picture Defined
The CTP concept has emerged from the military's pursuit of information technology. The concept is fairly new and still vague. According to one definition:
The CTP is derived from the CTD [common tactical data set] and other sources and the current depiction of the battlespace for a single operation within a CINC's AOR [commander-in-chief's area of responsibility], including current, anticipated or projected, and planned disposition of hostile, neutral, and friendly forces as they pertain to United States and multinational operations ranging from peacetime through crisis and war. The CTP includes force location, real time and non-real time sensor information, and amplifying information . . . .
In short, this means that all relevant information for an AOR will be depicted graphically. Using information technology and communications advancements to tie this depiction remotely to a common data set, a data base of all relevant information for the AOR, will give all tactical users access to the CTP. For the sake of this discussion, assume that it will be provided down to the squad level.
As the user interface for the military's command and control system, the CTP is a means for providing enhanced situational awareness to tactical decision-makers:
The fundamental purpose of command and control is, first, to recognize what needs to be done in a situation and, second, to see to it that appropriate actions are taken. Command and control is thus essentially about effective decision-making and effective execution.
Decision-Making Modeled
Fundamental to developing an effective tactical picture is an understanding of how warfighters develop situational awareness and convert it into effective decisions and actions. A model is useful for understanding such abstract ideas. Colonel John Boyd's observation-orientation-decision-action loop is a familiar model for decision-making. Bloom's taxonomy of the cognitive domain presents an even more detailed model of how knowledge progresses beyond just reacting! Taking the initiative is important in the Marine Corps' concept of maneuver warfare; for this reason, Bloom's model will be used throughout this discussion.
The abstract information rendered by the nature of military operations other than war and the ambiguity introduced by the nature of the information processes underlying the common tactical picture pose challenges.
Military Operations Other Than War
Most forces—friendly, neutral, and hostile—engaged in such operations no doubt will organize themselves according to conventional orders of battle. United States experiences in recent operations, e.g., humanitarian assistance operations in Somalia in the early 1990s, support this proposition.
The social infrastructure of Somalia had been destroyed after the collapse of the formal government and several years of famine, leaving warring clans to battle for territory and control. Responding to the widespread and prolonged famine, at least 49 humanitarian relief organizations were operating in Somalia. A coalition of forces from 21 countries responded to provide security for relief operations and some degree of stability to the region. These factors contributed to an uncertain situation overall and provided much of the relevant knowledge as abstractions.
The as hoc nature of the clan structures—no uniforms, insignia, or unit identifiers—made them difficult to track as discrete forces. The many armed vehicles that prowled the streets were similarly difficult to account for. Situation maps at the time depicted estimated clan boundaries, centers of significant activity such as marketplaces, cache sites, and suspected locations of clan leaders, and were updated by continual contact reports from patrols. Human intelligence was the key to gaining situational awareness but it, too, left room for speculation. Much of the activity and trends it provided also were intangible. All of this meant that the majority of the information concerning potentially hostile forces was ambiguous and not easily portrayed graphically.
The situation regarding neutral forces was equally vague. The large number of humanitarian organizations operating in Somalia with different functions and varying arrangements presented difficulties in graphically depicting their situation. Although their locations were not too difficult to indicate, standard military symbology did not reveal completely the type of activity or the status of their personnel and facilities.
Even the situation regarding friendly forces was ambiguous enough to render graphical portrayal inadequate. In the case of multinational forces in Somalia, the portrayal of platoons from different countries as simple icons did not depict the situation with total accuracy. Common tactical picture users would have had to understand the disparities between capabilities of a Bangladeshi infantry platoon and a French Foreign Legion infantry platoon, or the tactical picture would have had to indicate the differences somehow. Standard military symbology appears to be inadequate when displaying unfamiliar, specialized, or unorthodox units.
Bloom's taxonomy of the cognitive domain suggests the need to extend perspective to realize creativity and initiative. A simplistic visualization of the situation as icons on a digital map may not provide the richness of information necessary for decision makers to grasp the complexities of a given situation.
Regarding digital battlefield visualization, the U.S. Army during Exercise Prairie Warrior 98 found "[a] lack of display tools for visualizing the battlespace in terms of more abstracted events, time-distance-resource decisions, and Battlefield Operating System (BOS) synchronization." If the 4th Infantry Division's tactical operations center lacked the capability to portray adequately intangible information in a conventional scenario, considerable innovation in this area will be required to provide an effective picture to squads involved in unconventional warfare.
The Nature of Information Processes
As we come to rely on common tactical picture to maintain situational awareness, users will need to develop an understanding of the information processes that provide the picture. As Bloom would put it, this understanding provides the explanations that lead from simple knowledge to comprehension. Comprehension of the picture is then refated to external stimuli. Without a basic understanding of the sources and processes that generate such a picture, tacticians will be unable to effectively convert knowledge into proactive responses.
The Marine Corps Warfighting Lab's 1997 Hunter Warrior Advanced Warfighting Experiment provides a good example of how inadequate understanding of the context in which information underlying the tactical picture can lead to faulty analysis and responses. Decision makers at Camp Pendleton, California, monitored the Hunter-Warrior situation—which was taking place more than 100 miles away at Twenty-nine Palms—via digital reports from surveillance teams and a variety of tactical, theater, and national sensors. Information from Twenty-nine Palms was displayed on digital maps using standard icons from the chart application of the Joint Maritime Command Information System (JMCIS).
Watch standers soon realized that areas of the maps lacking icons did not necessarily mean the corresponding areas at Twenty-nine Palms were devoid of units. Often, clear areas of the maps meant no sensors were covering those areas or the sensors were unable to detect any units. The watch standers recognized the displays' ambiguities and consulted with intelligence watch standers, information managers, and track data base managers to develop an understanding of the context of the common tactical picture.
Hubert Dreyfus, author of What Computers Still Can't Do, suggests that a fundamental of human information processing is our ability to use context to reduce ambiguity sufficiently without having to eliminate ambiguity completely. This sense of the situation, which he calls "fringe consciousness," allows us to exclude most possibilities in a given situation. Narrowing the possibilities by ignoring ambiguities when taken out of context is referred to as "ambiguity tolerance."
Ambiguity tolerance fits well with the idea that uncertainty is an inescapable characteristic of warfare; information can be missing, unreliable, ambiguous and conflitting, or too complex to unravel. Maintaining context allows planners and commanders to tolerate ambiguity and deal with these uncertainties.
Related to ambiguity tolerance is the tendency to accept the situation display as reality. It may seem obvious that just because it appears on situation display does not mean it is reality. Remember the Hunter-Warrior watch standers who were lulled easily into accepting what they saw on the screen as reality? The limited context provided by a two-dimensional digital situation map provides less tolerance for ambiguity. Common tactical picture users will need to maintain context and constantly question the fidelity of the situation display.
Some Solutions
That the CTP concept will confront the vague nature of military operations other than war is not in doubt; the international climate nearly guarantees that. The ambiguity introduced by complex information processing systems may overwhelm small unit leaders reliant upon the picture, especially if any measure of Joint Vision 2010 and network-centric warfare is realized. Combined, the uncertainties of operations other than war and the ambiguities of complex information systems threaten to devastate commanders' situational awareness.
The solution lies in the relationship of mutual understanding between the system and the user. The systems, especially the interfaces such as the CTP, must be designed with an understanding of the decision-maker's cognitive processes and tailored to suit the commander's needs. Conversely, the decision-maker must understand the information systems and the context in which information is gathered and processed.
Technology and Military Collaboration
Technology offers a myriad of solutions for graphically displaying abstract information. The human-computer interface is the shared domain of the scientist and the military professional.
Once again, the Marine Corps deserves credit for its innovative spirit. Tactical commands are developing web based approaches to handling information, and organizations at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command are conducting formal experimentation. Marines at every level have been encouraged to share their ideas.
Information-technology experts are at the cutting edge of innovation in processing and managing information. Cognitive scientists are developing models of decision processes that may assist with designing information systems to support decision-making. Engineers are devising more effective human-computer interfaces and pioneering means of visualization.
Experience from Hunter-Warrior confirms, yet again, that the most effective means of exploiting the latest developments for military application is direct collaboration between the military user and the developer. The Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C., was developing, slowly, a Virtual Reality Responsive Workbench. Once the system and its developers were located with the Marines at Camp Pendleton, development accelerated rapidly. Developers experienced firsthand the requirements of the warfighters. The warfighters realized the potential of the visualization system and provided immediate and constant feedback. Close collaboration was the key.
User Education
The common tactical picture has the potential to be pushed down to the lowest echelons. Widespread distribution means that interfaces to an extremely complex information processing system will be used throughout the battlespace. As has been shown, the context in which the information is gathered and processed is critical for decision-makers to maintain accurate situational awareness and ambiguity tolerance. Education is the way to attain and maintain this context. All users with access to information systems via a common tactical picture must have a general appreciation for the sensors that feed the system and the analytical methods that create relevant information from the inputs.
The curriculum for this education should include sensor capabilities, including accuracy, fault tolerances, and countermeasures that could deny detection. Analytical processes also should be taught. Users should understand what information computers automatically analyze and what involves human interaction. In addition, users should be able to determine what information is provided as estimates, to include an appreciation for probability and alternate solutions. Ultimately, users must be able to evaluate independently the information they are provided and integrate it with what they observe when they look up from the computer displays.
The future promises to provide the Marine Corps many opportunities to conduct military operations other than war, and information technology can assist with command and control in this especially uncertain environment if it is developed beyond the paradigms of conventional warfare. The ambiguities introduced by the information processes that underlie the common tactical picture, however, can have a devastating effect on decisions unless users learn how to compensate for system imitations.
Captain Rau, an intelligence officer, is a National Intelligence Support Team planner on the Joint Staff. A 1999 graduate of the Marine Corps Command and Control Systems course, he has served with the Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (Experimental) and Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron (Composite)-164.