What is ForceNet? What will it look like? How will it help the Navy and Marine Corps? Although there are no firm answers to these questions yet, this new network will be familiar to Internet users. One thing is certain: ForceNet will not be effective unless the power of the Global Positioning System is part and parcel of all data on the network.
It is clear from many recent press reports that ForceNet is not well understood by war fighters in the Navy and Marine Corps. Many do not know what it is or how it will contribute to the U.S. military's ability to prevail in combat. One reason is that ForceNet still is in the concept stage. The situation also is not helped by the obscure, computer-geek language often used to describe ForceNet and its potential functions. As retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper pointed out at a Naval Institute symposium last year, "If we are unable to write in plain, simple English so an ordinary Marine could understand it, then our ability to ever implement [ForceNet], I think, is poor."
The same problem applies to network-centric warfare in general. ForceNet is but one element of a developing joint enterprise owned by the Defense Information Systems Agency and the services. The Army and Air Force elements are Land WarNet and the Command-and-Control Constellation, respectively. The joint pieces include the Defense Information Systems Network, Global Information Grid-Bandwidth Expansion, Global Broadcast System, and several others. This article attempts to provide some simple, understandable examples showing what it could be like to have ForceNet in the fleet, but it also sounds a warning about building the network itself. Unless we take the trouble to integrate Global Positioning System (GPS) data into the overall network-centric warfare system of systems, ForceNet will fail to deliver the operational advantage over our adversaries that is its true promise.
Thinking about the Web
The easiest way to understand ForceNet is to start with the Internet, or, better still, the World Wide Web and your everyday Web browser software. Most Americans past the age of five have seen and poked around the Web using a browser, but many may not know the concepts of Web pages, browsing, and the Internet itself originated in the intelligence community 40 years ago as a means of sharing information between analysts. At its simplest level, ForceNet will be a military version of the World Wide Web, where all naval users will have a reliable network connection regardless of location and will be able to post information and search through, download, and analyze what others have posted. Throw in e-mail, instant messaging, creating personal Web pages, and tight security, and you pretty much have the picture. So far, so good.
What is puzzling about most ForceNet concept and description documents is the part that says, in effect, "we network everybody together, and suddenly a miracle happens." Somehow, war fighters and their supporting forces will be able to use this networking capability to accomplish their missions better. Typically, the improvement in mission success is discussed in terms of speed, in both building situational awareness and better/faster decision making. For the majority of us who have used the Web to do mundane civilian tasks (or even complex research projects), however, a bunch of questions quickly come to mind. What makes us so sure ForceNet users will not swamp themselves with reams of mostly irrelevant data? How can we be sure we will not make decisions more slowly, or not at all, and fail to notice critical events because there is simply too much to consider?
The term "fog of war" sometimes is defined as an inability to discern the overall strategic picture when it is clouded by too many details. How do we ensure ForceNet will clear the fog rather than deepen it? And if we do gain better situational awareness, how will ForceNet help us execute chosen actions more quickly?
GPS Brings Correlation in Space and Time
Let us walk through two ForceNet illustrations using everyday analogies from the Internet. Suppose you are going to New York City for a weekend, it is your first visit, and you want to plan a fun trip. You need to decide where to stay and where to eat, do some daytime sightseeing, and to see A Chorus Line on Broadway. You plan to use the Internet to help put together a good itinerary, and you want to do it in 30 minutes. The good news is that the Internet can provide useful information about every one of these items in one sitting. The bad news is there are thousands of Web sites filled with facts and opinions on every hotel, restaurant, theater, and tourist attraction in the city. Unless you have an easy way to filter the information that is relevant, credible, and useful to you, you could spend days or weeks searching and you would not be any closer to having a trip planned.
One approach is to use a search engine such as Google to find the theater where A Chorus Line is playing and get the address and showtimes for which tickets are available. Then you could use a site such as Expedia or Travelocity to search for the hotels and restaurants within a three-block radius and see if there are any good package deals for rooms, tickets, and dinners. This approach is based on correlating data in space and time, focusing on one key event (the time and location of the show), and then choosing the itinerary based on proximity, convenience, and your taste in food and lodging. This ability to do spatial and temporal filtering to extract and correlate useful information from a huge database is critical to getting real value from the Internet, especially if you need to do it quickly. It will be equally critical to ForceNet.
To do such correlation in ForceNet, each item of posted data must carry a "tag" or label, and at the very least this tag must contain the three-dimensional location and time at which the event occurred that generated the data. The standard for providing the location and time must be GPS, because GPS is the only universally available common time/space reference accurate to a few meters and nanoseconds. Think of this tag as a GPS-referenced, very precise, four-dimensional label attached to every individual data item. In addition, ForceNet also must be built and specified in a way that preserves each tag with its respective data as it is transmitted, received, stored, and retrieved. The tags could contain more information than location and time (more on that later). If all available data are tagged using precisely the same datum or geographical reference system and time constant, we quickly can make sense of the relationship in space and time between events of interest. In fact, we can begin to automate the process.
This is not a new idea. As soon as aerial reconnaissance images became available during World War I, the first reaction was, "This is great, but where is this, and when was it taken?" Even a crystal-clear image of what could be a very important event takes on much more meaning if it is known exactly when and where it happened. We can gain insight and understanding from putting the event in the proper sequence with other facts and inferences we have available-this is what correlation is all about. As we have progressed into the era of near-real-time imaging in multiple spectrums, the intelligence community has expended huge efforts to ensure its surveillance systems provide "metadata" containing precise time and georeference tags along with their imagery output. Metadata also enable meaningful fusion of data from different sensors. Without the space/time correlation down to meters and nanoseconds that GPS allows, we easily can increase confusion by fusing sensor information, because we will see multiple tracks from multiple sensors that are really observing the same object.
The vacation example above illustrates what in war fighting is called deliberate planning. The trip was planned in advance to visit "targets" that were not moving. A warfighting equivalent might be targeting a building as a potential enemy headquarters after a suspicious signals intercept, correlated in space and time with several different reconnaissance images and direct observations, and all collected by different means at different times. This process is done efficiently and routinely today in intelligence centers worldwide. Having ForceNet would enable such correlation to be done not only much faster (even automatically), but also in more places and at more tactical levels.
What about a civilian example of responsive, time-sensitive planning in a dynamic environment-the ultimate capability promised by ForceNet? If you are driving around a city at rush hour to attend a meeting and you run into a backup, it already is too late to avoid the problem. You are able to see only the traffic immediately around you, so you cannot anticipate the slowdown. If you are listening to the radio and the town is unfamiliar, you may not know the landmarks the traffic reporter is using to describe the problem, let alone know a good way to reroute around the blockage. If you are lucky enough to have a colleague with a cell phone going to the same destination, and he is some distance ahead of you, he can use his over-the-horizon comm (the phone) to let you know what he is seeing and talk you around it.
The networked, GPS-equipped solution of the future is one that is just now becoming available in the newest luxury cars. A satellite radio station is connected to available traffic sensors and the local traffic-reporting center and broadcasts real-time traffic flow data to subscribers' cars. The new cars are equipped with a standard GPS navigation and map-display system, but it has been modified to receive data from the satellite radio and display the road segments where traffic has slowed to well below the posted speed limit. As long as you have entered your destination into your navigation system, it will automatically recalculate optimized routing around the traffic based on achieving the earliest arrival time.
Although much less complex than a warfighting problem, this example shows how the networking of real-time sensors with GPS navigation, a map-reference database, and autorouting software not only can increase situational awareness, but also can automatically optimize the plan to achieve the objective more quickly. This analogy also illustrates the value (and limitations) of speed with respect to an "enemy." If everyone on the road had exactly the same capability, the shortest alternate routes soon would become clogged. Those whose systems can sense problems and adjust the quickest would arrive at their destinations faster.
Putting this in the context of the warfighting arena, the value of an ability to sense the big picture of what is developing and to respond more quickly is easy to understand. Networking alone, however, cannot provide this capability. By tying together the real-time information from the sensors, the stored knowledge in the map database, and the rule-based processing from the destination routing software and referencing it to a single time/space coordinate system, this system can be used in near real time to achieve objectives taster than an enemy. There is, however, one more advantage of having information plus correlation that provides a key operational connection left out of most ForceNet concepts.
Targeting Turns Information into Action
The advent of GPS-guided weapons presents the opportunity to turn information directly into lethal (or other chosen) effects on adversaries. Given the virtual omnipresence of GPS signals and a weapon delivery system within range of a chosen target, a target can be engaged merely by knowing its current GPS coordinates and selecting the arrival time of the weapon. If we design our networked warfighting information system to provide the precise location in time and space of every event and observation it contains, not only can we gain awareness and make plans and decisions faster, but we also can act immediately without going through a separate, additional targeting process. And since GPS weapons have no dispersion (i.e., they do not lose accuracy over range), we can engage with weapons of any range as long as the target coordinates remain constant, or we can continue to generate updated target coordinates. The combination of GPS weapons and a networked command-and-control and information-surveillance-reconnaissance environment will create unprecedented operational capabilities.
How is this faster and better than the kind of targeting already available? After a decision has been made that a given object is a target and should be engaged, killing it with older terminally guided or even unguided weapons requires target acquisition at some point. The shooter, the delivery platform, or the weapon seeker (if it has one) must obtain a line-of-sight view of the target in some spectrum, or detect energy the target is either emitting or reflecting. This acquisition must be maintained until impact for the weapon system to steer itself, or, in the case of a ballistic weapon, the target cannot move outside the effects radius before the weapon arrives once the aimpoint is calculated. Failure to acquire, track, or illuminate the target for any reason will result in a miss. To do all this requires time and another set of sensors on the delivery platforms and/or weapons, in addition to the sensors that generated the intelligence to decide the object was a target in the first place.
Since GPS weapons fly to a designated point in space, neither the shooter nor the weapon actually has to detect and/or track the target. Some system of sensors, links, and processors must find the target, precisely determine its position in the GPS reference frame, and provide that information to the weapon (including timely updates if the target moves). The good news here, however, is that those functions all can be performed by some other entity physically separated from the weapon or shooter. If these entities are networked with all the shooters and weapons, whichever weapon platform is closest or most effective can engage the target immediately. Targeting can be an inherent (and instantaneous) function of ForceNet itself, if it is designed and built to deliver four-dimensional metadata as part and parcel of the information that drives the decision to shoot. You could be 1,000 miles away or right on scene, but if information on the network leads you to decide to hit a certain building or vehicle, you already know its position or track-you just need to send a launch message to a networked, in-range shooter that already has the same information.
Additional information (but not too much) beyond GPS location and time should be considered for inclusion on the tags that label every bit of data available on ForceNet. This might include the sensor used, so anyone reading the data also would have available the accuracy, resolution, and spectrum in which the event was observed. Some kind of keyword or standardized event type also would help in performing rapid, automated searches and correlation of data. As soon as a user comes across an item of interest, its associated "what, where, and when" would be known, and he could begin to search for, correlate, fuse, and understand any other data through their relationship in time, space, and type of event. Simultaneously, he could create a file or threshold for additional or new data in the same area, of the same type, and so on. A great deal of previous work on intelligence and database creation and use exists that can be applied to the design of ForceNet.
Include GPS-Based Tagging from the Start
It is important to consider all of this now, before the concepts of ForceNet and network-centric warfare are fully specified and assembled from hardware and software. Hard lessons have been learned in the intelligence community about what happens if sensor information is generated without precise time/location metadata attached, or if the networks, applications, and databases used to collect and process the data do not preserve these tags. To correlate and interpret imagery information, especially for targeting, the missing metadata need to be re-created later at great time and expense, and never will be as accurate as the originals. Similar lessons are evident in trying to build a single integrated air picture or common operational picture. Attempts to correlate and fuse multiple tracks from different radars or other sensors, absent a single precise time and georeference standard, creates nothing but a blurry picture of false and unknown contacts. Many issues will need to be resolved, but now is the time to require GPS-based metadata tagging in ForceNet, so we do not have to go back and do it later at much greater expense.
Colonel Kuzmick is President and CEO of Whitney, Bradley & Brown, Inc., a technical and management consulting firm.