Just added the latest from Nikki Carter on Empire Challenge 09 (EC 09) which begins next week.
EC09, a live joint and coalition intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) interoperability demonstration, runs simultaneously at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif., with distributed locations in the Joint Intelligence Lab in Suffolk, Va., the Combined Air Operations Center-Experimental at Langley Air Force Base, Hampton, Va., service Distributed Common Ground/Surface System (DCGS) labs, coalition sites in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency in the Netherlands.
Nikki’s article quotes John Kittle, EC09 operational manager, who said EC09 centers on bringing mission critical ISR data to the commanders who need the data at the “tactical edge.”
“We are looking for solutions that provide a greater amount of situational awareness and battlespace awareness to the operators that have to make decisions on the battlefield, getting more of the intelligence data to them, better quality, more timely, more precision and all the methods and procedures and technologies that contribute to that.”
The demonstration examines questions like what gets the job done better and what still needs to be developed.
Read more.
This is all well and good but how do you quantify the impact of increased situational awareness on performance? Do you run these challenges both with and without new levels of intelligence being available to the war fighter? More is not always better. What if a situation is dire? Does increased knowledge of how bad the situation may be cause some unit to behave more heroically or courageously and how do you even measure such things? Good military intelligence should be judged on accuracy and on giving the war fighter only that information which will give him strategic and/or tactical advantage.