New Tools Available for Network-Centric Warfare

Reservoir Hill writes "MIT Technology Review reports that a new map-based application is the latest tool in the military's long-term plan to introduce what is sometimes called "network-centric warfare." The Tactical Ground Reporting System, or TIGR allows patrol leaders in Iraq to learn about city landmarks and past events and more than 1,500 junior officers in Iraq — about a fifth of patrol leaders — are using the map-centric application before going on patrol and adding new data to TIGR upon returning. By clicking on icons and lists, they can see the locations of key buildings, like mosques, schools, and hospitals, and retrieve information such as location data on past attacks, geotagged photos of houses and other buildings (taken with cameras equipped with Global Positioning System technology), and photos of suspected insurgents and neighborhood leaders. They can even listen to civilian interviews and watch videos of past maneuvers. "The ability ... to draw the route ... of your patrol that day and then to access the collective reports, media, analysis of the entire organization, is pretty powerful," says Major Patrick Michaelis. "It is a bit revolutionary from a military perspective when you think about it, using peer-based information to drive the next move. ... Normally we are used to our higher headquarters telling the patrol leader what he needs to think.""

You'd think...

[nagora]

that these guys were constantly under threat from some uber-opponent instead of being the most over-funded organisation in history, capable of literally destroying all life on Earth. Why do they need MORE technology? Shouldn't they have to wait until they can use what they already have properly?

TWW

Re:Very cool tech

[ChefInnocent]

Perhaps you should look at the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) data published by the Census bureau. It is a cool set of map files. You can find more at http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/ [census.gov].

I know the transportation departments across the country use the files.

Re:You'd think...

[TubeSteak]

FTFA:

"One of the very first things we did in looking at the IED problem was to recognize that the army is trying to fight an insurgency with a pretty blunt instrument," [Walter Perry, a senior researcher at the Rand think tank in Arlington, VA, and a Vietnam-era army signals officer] says. "This is about 90 percent police work and 10 percent violent conflicts. Patrols--the cop on a beat--fill out a report saying, Here is what I did. You get situational awareness."

So to answer your question, they need more technology because 90% of the time, they're operating outside their core competency.

All Baghdad needed from the outset was police on the ground to prevent it from degenerating into the Sunni/Shi'a/USA clusterfuck it is today. In 2003, US troops were not prepared for that job, nor were their bosses prepared for that eventuality, even though many people had accurately predicted what was going to happen.

It's nice to see the boys at the RAND Institute saying that dealing with domestic terrorism is essentially a police problem. Hopefully we'll keep that in mind if anything ever happens again in the USA.

Re:and here's...

[Brian Gordon]

Call me a slashdotter, but I think they should get gamers' input for things like this. After hundreds of hours of Insurgency [insmod.net] and BF2 I can also attest that overhead maps are insanely helpful in planning large maneuvers when in command, though you need to actually know the level inside and out to actually get anything done as a foot soldier. Not really appropriate to the less-realistic Battlefield, but in Insurgency at least, effective peer-to-peer communication is absolutely essential to winning the round. I mean like if you haven't played those ultra-realistic style shooters you can't even imagine.. to be pinned down by SAW fire and call for help from the forward squad, they take a detour through a side building and take out the SAW so your squad can move up.. but at the same time, if real life squad leaders are sitting there watching deployment videos during a battle his squad's gonna get slaughtered around him..

Re:You'd think...

[oodaloop]

As a defense contractor who's worked on (and taught) Net-centricity and as a former Marine, I can say that what we're facing is an enemy that is capable of much more speed and agility than we are. The whole point of Net-centric warfare is to move away from top-down Cold War era Command and Control to something more along the lines of what these emergent, adaptive, complex terrorist and insurgent networks use. Intead of wasting time and energy trying to adapt to a moving target, so to speak, these kinds of technologies allow tactical commanders to make faster decisions on the battlespace.

What is the peer and the tidbit in such a mesh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Defining the "peer" in a military scenario is important. The peer and the information they bring to the table are linked together but confidence levels for each piece of data need to be mentioned. How to justify an assigned confidence level ...good luck with that guys. I would imagine it could work if you make allocations for the different types of peers and place different confidence levels based on Military Rank. Someone without a rank evidently is flagged with lower confidence level. The actual data could be scored with a peerPerceivedConfidence, peerPerceivedScenarioEventImportance, peerPerceivedPotentialScenarioEvent. A pseudo data structure: @tidbit[] = { "location", "useful information about a location", "who gave it", "assigned confidence level in person who gave it", "perceived confidence/accuracy of this tidbit", [arrayhere]{"perceived potential event importance score", "important for which potential events"} } One more thing: I have faith in the military powers that be, they have good heads on their shoulders. I am certain we have people that have thought up all of this generations ago before computers came out and that the NATO governments in particular have been using this kind of software long before you guys mentioned it here on slashdot. I am also certain I'm not the only one that believes the higher ranks be given higher confidence levels. Cheers :)