The Promise of Persistent Surveillance: What Are the Implications for the Common Operating Picture?
Abstract
Defense and intelligence community initiatives to create persistent surveillance capabilities and enable access to the resultant continuous data streams will create significant change in the Joint Force and its partners operating across the domains and levels of war. The Joint Force must act in qualitatively different ways to deal with current and future threats, including the transnational extremist threat the United States will face for the coming decades. New operational concepts as envisioned by the U.S. Joint Forces Command guide service transformations, redefine linkages with other elements of national power, and seek full integration of the Joint Force with all its partners: Department of Defense (DoD), non-DoD, and multinational. Intelligence transformation from the Cold War Reconnaissance Paradigm to the Persistence Paradigm creates a qualitatively different type of intelligence support and moves actionable intelligence to the lowest levels of formations in this new operating construct. This new paradigm will enable United States, DoD, non-DoD, and coalition forces to act coherently through shared understanding, and to engage in adaptive planning and dynamic execution, outmatching global adversaries in agility and decision speed. The integrating mechanism for delivering persistent surveillance across all domains and levels of war will be the 21st century Common Operating Picture (COP). Enterprise data, collaborative planning, and networked actions will change command methods and control structures as the military conducts the global war against dispersed and distributed threats. Embedded decision aids, modeling, and an advanced neural network act as a synthetic brain to empower the lowest levels of formations and mission partners. The granularization of warfare, enabled by persistent surveillance feeds into the COP, will enable U.S. forces and security system partners to win the decision battle in the 21st century.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 26, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA436140
Entities
People
- David W. Pendall
Organizations
- United States Army Command and General Staff College