'Information fusion' key to winning wars.

• Author: Farrell, Jr., Lawrence P.
• Position: President's Perspective

When Air Force Secretary James Roche was asked recently what he thought was the most effective platform in the war on terrorism, the answer may surprise a lot of people. Roche said the most helpful system was not an airplane or a combat vehicle, but the "air operations center."

What made a huge difference in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said Roche, was the fusion of information. The ability to take information--from sensors aboard satellites, Joint Stars, Predator, Global Hawk--integrate it, and use that intelligence to cue weapon systems is what gives a joint commander a critical edge.

The commander of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Army Gem Tommy Franks, aggressively exploited the fusion of information. He built an integrated command center in Qatar that has come to exemplify what warfare will be like from now on. Franks could see a picture of the battlefield as events unfolded. That truly changed the way the war was fought. Network-centric operations had ceased to be pie-in-the-sky concepts and had become part of the reality of war.

A network-centric approach to military operations is affecting not only strategy and tactics, but also the way the Defense Department funds research, development and procurement programs.

The services, which traditionally have been averse to sharing information and making systems interoperable with others, slowly are defining their programs and shaping their budgets around network-centric concepts. The bottom line for the services is that every platform must be treated as a node in what the Pentagon calls the "global information grid." If a system can't plug into the GIG and play with other systems, it is unlikely to survive budget drills, where programs increasingly are being measured by their contributions to joint capabilities. The GIG is being designed as a standards-based, open "system-of-systems" that will rely heavily on industry solutions.

Each service, as expected, has come up with its own strategy to implement their vision of" how to integrate into the GIG. The Army calls it LandWarNet, the Navy FORCENet and the Air Force Command and Control Constellation. Vigilance is necessary to insure these systems can exchange information easily. Exercises and experiments now being organized by the Joint Forces Command will be key to ensure net-centricity across the defense enterprise.

The Defense Department already has launched an effort to make the GIG even more capable, via a program called GIG-BE, for bandwidth...