In a technology sense, rapidity includes the speed of operational planning, determining appropriate action, deployment, and employment all focused toward minimizing response time. Three factors combine to make military planning far more difficult today than in the Cold War era. First, there is great uncertainty early on in the location of a conflict, who the adversary may be, and with whom one may be allied. Second, there is normally very little time available for planning, with the military sometimes having only weeks or days before committing troops to an unanticipated mission. Third, vastly more information is available to the planner, which is both a blessing and a curse. Several technologies that partially define Intelligent Dynamic Planning will make it easier for the commander to plan Rapid Dominance:

• Model based planning
• Machine intelligence
• Dynamic planning based upon feedback and new information
• Selectively automated decision aides (commanders associate)
• Imbedded rehearsal and training
• Brilliance in Execution

It is impossible to institutionalize brilliance. However, the standard can be set. The Dynamic Planning noted above is part of the capability for this characteristic as are the systems and technologies discussed below.

Technologies Critical to Achieving Brilliance in Rapid Dominance

For shock to be administered with minimum collateral damage, key targets of value must be neutralized or destroyed, and the enemy must be made to feel completely helpless and unable to consider a meaningful response. Furthermore, the enemy's confusion must be complete, adding to a general impression of impotence. Most importantly, strategic targets, military forces, leadership and key societal resources must be located, tracked, and targeted. This will require substantial sensor, computational, and communication technologies. Designated targets must be destroyed rapidly and with assurance. Finally, the status and position of friendly forces must be known at all times, and the logistics supporting them must be sufficiently flexible to allow for rapid movement, reconfiguration, and decentralization of location.

Several technologies that can help in this are discussed below, as divided into the following subsections: sensors, computational systems, communications and system integration.

Sensor Technologies

Sensor technologies are grouped into four areas: active, passive, imbedded, and processing.

Active sensors: By far, the most important of the energy-emitting sensors is radar. Among the best all-weather capabilities of any type of sensor, the role for and capabilities of radar have steadily increased since the Second World War. Radar systems are used for early warning, air defense, air asset management, air traffic control, naval fleet defense, detection and tracking of moving ground targets, missile targeting, missile terminal guidance, terrain data development, and weather prediction. For Rapid Dominance, radars and other active sensors must operate with low probability of intercept. Particularly with stealthy systems, this will present a unique challenge to military systems where one may not expect a great amount of "spin-on" from the commercial sector. It is vitally important to be able to sense the enemy under all conditions and environments. Sensors must penetrate foliage and walls and detect threats such as underground and underwater mines.

There are many other important active sensor classes, three of which are active acoustics, lidar and magnetic anomaly detectors. Broadband underwater active acoustics could address pressing needs such as shallow-water anti-submarine warfare and mine detection (both buried and silt covered). The practical application of lidar is a relatively recent development enabled by advances in laser, power management, and data processing technologies. Lidar can be used for fire control, weapon guidance, foliage penetration (vegetation is translucent in the near infrared (NIR) regime), and target imaging/recognition. Lidar detects shape directly and shape fluctuations such as vibration and motion and has proven very hard to spoof. Magnetic anomaly detectors will continue to find application in areas of anti-mine and anti-submarine warfare and in screening for weapons at security checkpoints and elsewhere.

Electronic emissions are of themselves a liability only where they create a signature of use to an enemy. The ability to emit energy, yet in ways that are less discernible, should be an attractive avenue to explore for the future. The coordinated application of many sensor platforms, some of which may be completely passive, in conjunction with emitting sensors is a potentially major area of exploration.

Passive sensors: Among the passive sensor types, the most important for U.S. forces is forward-looking infrared (FLIR). FLIR technology has allowed the U.S. to "own the night," as was handily displayed in Operation Desert Storm. Some of the significant technology advancements underway in this area include multiple wavelength sensors, very large focal planes, and the increasing performance of uncooled sensors. Particularly in the area of uncooled sensors, commercial developments are underway that promise to drastically reduce the cost of competent IR sensors.

Other passive sensor technologies of note include hyperspectral visible/NIR collection and processing and inexpensive, scatterable, unattended ground sensors (acoustic, seismic, "hot spot," etc.). Hyperspectral imaging allows target searches to be conducted in the frequency domain, as opposed to the spatial domain as is the norm today. This provides a powerful new input for automatic target recognition (ATR) systems, is useful for addressing low observables (LO), and is especially important for remote imaging assets.

Unattended ground sensors allow critical areas to be monitored continually. For example, the actual area of operations for Scuds in ODS was relatively small, but it was very difficult for then-current sensing systems to oversee. Technologies being developed in the area of microelectromechanical systems, in particular, hold promise for enabling capable and inexpensive sensor fields.

Imbedded sensors: Monitoring the position and status of Blue and friendly forces and assets is of equal importance in tracking the enemy. GPS presented a tremendous advantage to troops in ODS. This capability needs to be extended down to the individual soldier, and the status of all critical material and personnel needs to be tracked.

Sensor signal processing: Finally, the signals from modern sensors are of limited use without proper processing and presentation to the user. This area will be developed further in the computational technologies section. Technologies that are historically grouped with sensor systems include automatic target recognition, imbedded multisensor fusion and correlation, and displays.

Computational Technologies

The capabilities of the integrated circuit (IC), and in particular the microprocessor, continue to increase unabated. Certainly, physical limits must be approached at some point, but each looming barrier has so far been met by technological innovation. Nevertheless, should the march of IC improvements slow somewhat, the software and networking technologies that are being developed at an accelerating pace will permit the vision of Rapid Dominance to become of ever increasing utility.

Rapid Dominance requires the collection, management, and fast access of enormous quantities of information. Technologies that will enable this include computational hardware advances such as increasingly powerful workstations, reduced-cost image generators, massively parallel machines, compact displays, reduced-cost memory devices (i.e., DRAM, RAID, and optical jukeboxes) client/server-specific database engines, reconfigurable simulation cells, "wearable" PCs, advanced human-computer interface (HCI) techniques (i.e., voice interfaces and those coming to define "virtual reality"), and PCMCIA technology for peripherals (i.e., digital comms boards, miniaturized hard drives, and modems).

Software advances will be even more critical for Rapid Dominance. Areas of importance include:

• Network data engines
• Object-oriented architectures
• Advanced modeling and simulation
• Machine intelligence
• Automatic target recognition
• Computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools

Network technologies are just now emerging but are being driven at a frenzied pace in the commercial marketplace. A variety of advanced tools beyond "hot link" browsing are being introduced daily. Data browsers, brokers, gatherers, and network repositories are being released, as demonstrated by products like Harvester and Netscape's Catalog Server. Platform independent languages such as JAVA and their associated virtual computational engines promise the same network flexibility for programs that is now enjoyed by data.

Perhaps the most important area of technology development for Rapid Dominance is the development of practical object-oriented architectures and protocols. Protocols such as CORBA, OLE, ALSP, HLA and DIS¹ are changing the face of computing, making it much easier to link programs and databases, and access and correlate information that was previously "entombed" within its legacy application.

One interesting application area migrating toward an object-oriented approach is geospatial databases. In the past, geospatial data were stored as either raster-based or vector information, and significant processing was required for users to make queries regarding roads, areas, or objects such as building sites. A new approach, called a spatial database engine, creates intuitive objects from standard geospatial databases and uses commercial databases to add attributes to the objects. This is a very powerful technique that allows geospatial data, a key element of warfighting, to be managed quickly and efficiently using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software. It is particularly useful for distributed databases such as one would find on a network.

Modeling and simulation is also benefiting from object-oriented technologies. Simulations were once stand-alone codes. If one wanted to simulate a joint battle, one began with an existing model (i.e., land combat) and then modified it to include other components (i.e., aircraft and ships). Similarly, if a new technology were to be modeled, new code normally had to be written, even in cases where good, validated, stand-alone technology models existed. The obvious drawbacks to this approach are that it is costly, often produces inferior simulations for the new additions, and quickly results in extremely large codes with commensurate large code management problems. Object-oriented approaches allow models and simulations to be linked to form a richer environment for examining new technologies and joint force structures.

Linking force-on-force simulations with design tools such as computer-aided design (CAD) programs and physics-based simulations presents a new type of tool referred to as simulation-based design. Once fully realized, this capability will allow new technologies to be much more easily evaluated, introducing a source for greater efficiency into today's somewhat haphazard acquisition system.

Simulations based on object-oriented architectures also promise more flexibility that will enable scenarios and unexpected situations to be made as inputs and simulated rapidly, forming the core for a battlefield visualization system capable of modeling "what if" situations. Outputs from these simulations could be used for mission rehearsal. Even today, pilots and special operations forces often "fly through" crude, three-dimensional renderings of a mission area to familiarize themselves with information such as surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites and landmarks.

The promise of computational technologies brings with it potential vulnerabilities that must be protected against threats. In a world where information plays a vital role in warfare, information collection and processing tools will become targets. Defenses against information warfare must be developed. The threat is real and is growing especially in the commercial and private sectors. Even today, malicious hackers devise data-destroying viruses and distribute them through a plethora of electronic media; numerous sites on the Net are dedicated to the discussion and development of offensive computer viruses, with ample tools for even the novice to download and employ. Moreover, computer crimes cost the world economy billions of dollars annually. Although information warfare poses serious threats, the realm of information is where operations underlying Rapid Dominance most reside, and the enemy will find himself fully engaged should he choose to fight on our terms. Rapid Dominance is essentially information warfare on a grand scale in all dimensions of offensive, defensive and leveraging effective use of available information.

Communication Technologies

One of the modern communication devices being fielded within U.S. forces today is the SINGCARS radio. With a data rate of somewhat less than 10 kbps, SINGCARS is woefully inadequate for supporting Rapid Dominance. However, more appropriate technologies are emerging:

• GBS and other satellite broadcast services
• Wider bandwidth, digital communication protocols
• Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switches
• Advanced comm relay platforms (UAV, Lightsat, Iridium, etc.)

GBS, for example, figures prominently in the BADD (battlefield awareness and data dissemination) program that aims at providing close to 30 Mbps of data broadcast bandwidth. This will be supported by multi-terrabyte databases, advanced data browsers, and query managers, and will be linked to the Joint Tactical Internet.

Networking must also be supported by communications technologies. The basic problem of a battlefield network is that while some nodes may support very large data pipes, a number of nodes will be operating at SINGCARS data rates. This led to the BADD notion of one-way data broadcasting via GBS of large data files (such as UAV video and overhead imagery) and very low bandwidth data querying back to the data sources.

Modern communications will tend to be more multimedia-based, which is particularly important for Rapid Dominance, where decisions must be made quickly based upon very large quantities of data, some of which will be collected and transmitted in real time. Technologies such as digital video teleconferencing, virtual whiteboards, and even 3D virtual environments where commanders may participate in collaborative planning sessions will become important.

Finally, battlefield communications must be secure and, where feasible, non-observable to the enemy.