Following World War II, General of the Army Omar Bradley noted how he handled decision making in the midst of chaos and overwhelming reports: "You collect information, little bits of it, and it goes into your brain like feeding information into a 1401 IBM calculator. It's stored in there, but you are not conscious of it. You hear some of it over the phone, you see some of it on the map, in what you read, in briefings. It is still stored in your mind, then suddenly you are faced with a decision. You don't go back and pick up each one of the pieces of information, but you run over the main items that are involved and the answer comes out just like it does when you push the button on the IBM machine."
In the November 2002 issue of Government Executive (p. 56), an article on information contained a graph showing that World War I doughboys using field radio phones processed about 30 words per minute. In World War II, the information relay rate was 60 words per minute. During the Vietnam War, the rate was 150 words per minute. The first Gulf War saw a rate of 1,500 words per minute; this decade, the experts expect 1.5 trillion words per minute. As much as we want "more" information, we really just want the World War I rate of 30 words per minute to be able to pull out the actionable information. The fundamental quest is about knowing everything, which implies making a haystack smaller (or knowing precisely where to look in that haystack) and finding effective ways to absorb more information faster.
Just as U.S. Navy admirals in the 1930s introduced tactical innovations by integrating the aircraft carrier in naval operations, so U.S. Air Force planners are introducing a force multiplier in the form of collaborative software technologies to give combat commanders unprecedented battlespace situational awareness. The improvements have a lexicon of their own: machine-to-machine dialogue, closing information seams, and delivering actionable information to decision makers such as the joint force air component commander (JFACC).
Predictive battlespace awareness is the ability of your intelligence officer to know what changed in the last five minutes and predict the enemy's course of action, if any. It means having a database filled with every significant datum of the past 24 hours, including what the enemy had for breakfast and dinner and what his satellites are doing. Most important, it means being able to deduce and predict the enemy's courses of action before he embarks on them.
Air Force C2 Center
Giving decision makers the "big picture" has been the focus of a special Air Force agency since 1997. The Command-and-Control, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Center (known as the C2 Center) is headquartered at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. It has been on a fast track to deliver the latest decision-making tools and integrate command and control throughout the Air Force. At the same time, the C2 Center is focused on achieving joint interoperability for battle management command and control.
Comprising 700 Air Force, contractor, and government personnel, the C2 Center oversees the Air Force Experimentation Office in Hampton, Virginia, and the Command-and-Control Battle Laboratory at Hurlburt Field, Florida. It also has liaison officer positions at the Air Force's major commands, the Joint Forces Command (JFCom), and in several Department of Defense (DoD) organizations. Because the center is located in the Tidewater area of Virginia—a stone's throw from JFCom and the Naval Network Warfare Command—it is well positioned to enable the Air Force to achieve DoD and Joint Chiefs of Staff goals for an integrated command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capability to support joint operations.
Interest in the C2 Center was fueled during the first Air Force leadership "summit" on command and control last year. Chief of Staff of the Air Force General John Jumper said, "This is the decade of integration . . . it's about sensors, platforms, and apertures. Technological gains promise a wider aperture for the war fighter." Ongoing transformational network warfare projects at the Center include the common operating picture, single integrated air picture, and family of interoperable operational pictures.
Air Force-Navy Teamwork
The C2 Center edged the Air Force closer to networked interoperability by teaming with the Navy for a joint task force exercise in November 2002. The exercise was designed to help prepare the Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) Battle Group for deployment. Because the Mount Whitney (LCC-20) was tasked for real-world commitments, JFCom's Joint Training and Simulation Center in Suffolk, Virginia, served as the flagship.
The C2 Center commander, Major General Robert Behler, was the JFACC during the exercise. Then-commander of the Second Fleet, Vice Admiral Cutler Dawson expressed pleasure at the Air Force's cooperation: "This is exactly the kind of teamwork we need," he said from the bridge of the Harry S. Truman, flanked by General Behler, who added, "We are looking at finding solutions to achieve joint interoperability at the same time we're improving Air Force processes. We cannot operate in a vacuum."
At JFCom last summer, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld implored the Millennium Challenge 2002 team to stress interoperability: "We can no longer afford to build weapons systems without thinking jointness from the ground up." The C2 Center took that to heart. During the November 2002 exercise, it was able to beam the same air picture from the combined air operations center (CAOC) at Langley to the Harry S. Truman at sea. This demonstrated a major breakthrough in situational awareness.
The genesis of this capability came immediately after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, when the C2 Center integrated a fusion technology to assist North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in achieving a more detailed air picture of the United States. The improvement came in the form of a computer software program called the Multisource Correlator-Tracker developed by the Solipsys Corporation, which now allows NORAD to view more than 15,000 radar tracks per geographic sector. (A similar correlator-tracker currently is under development by the Navy and Pacific Air Forces to provide a common operating picture.)
Major General Behler's vision and foresight laid the groundwork for future interoperability exercises with Naval Network Warfare Command and the Second Fleet. He requested that a naval liaison officer be assigned to the CAOC at Langley to further integrate command-and-control processes between the two services. Further Air Force-Navy discussions led to plans for assigning an Air Force field-grade officer to the Mount Whitney.
Future of Command and Control
The C2 Center successfully demonstrated a pilot web portal project focused on Air Force air operations center processes. Current efforts are aimed at connecting Air Force stand-alone portal systems to a single web-centric collaborative framework on the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet). This powerful information dissemination tool would give users one access point for 90% of the information needed to perform their operational roles. The Air Force Enterprise Portal-SIPRNet project is a cooperative effort with industry. The center is looking for the right mix of industry leaders to continue to develop this initiative, which will be expanded to include interoperability with other service portals.
In addition, the C2 Center desires to develop battle management command and control and joint command and control with JFCom. It recently renamed the CAOC as the C2 Transformation Center (C2TC) to better develop advanced information technologies that can be fielded rapidly. The C2TC will improve linkage between the individual processes and system improvement efforts of traditional functional areas, and give increased emphasis to achieving the overarching capabilities identified as essential by the Chief of Staff of the Air Force task forces. It will integrate the combat air forces, mobility air forces, and space activities that range across Air Force "tribes" and weapon systems. Along with integrating Air Force activities, the renamed center will work closely with JFCom to mature evolutionary concepts such as the standing joint forces headquarters and network-centric warfare.
In 2004, the C2 Center will continue to identify innovative ideas that allow the Air Force to establish prototype systems rapidly. The Tidewater area is a key port of the strongest Navy in the world; coupled with JFCom and the C2 Center, it has the requisite technology base to solve the most difficult network-centric warfare problems.
The C2 Center's motto, "Getting the Right information to the Right people at the Right time to make the Right decision," emphasizes the importance of accurately sending information from sensors to shooters in the best format to increase lethality, mission effectiveness, and survivability. Transformation has taken on a life of its own through Air Force-Navy partnership efforts to deliver the big picture to 21st-century war fighters.
Colonel Branham, a graduate of the Naval War College, was mobilized to serve as a public affairs officer at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. He currently is the director of public affairs for the 89th Airlift Wing at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland.