Lack of 'Single Integrated Picture' Hinders Commanders, Study Says.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: NORAD studies highlights missile defense weaknesses

If acruise missile--fired from a ship or a submarine offshore--entered U.S. airspace, national authorities would detect it, but would not know where it came from.

Such a scenario was presented at a summer 2001 counter-terrorism exercise conducted by the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). One of the situations in the exercise, called Amalgam Virgo '01, was the firing of a cruise missile from a nondescript merchant ship in the Gulf of Mexico, into the U.S. mainland. Because cruise missiles fly at low altitudes, NORAD would not be able to see them from beyond the horizon.

The cruise-missile threat is just one example of the types of vulnerabilities that could be solved if the Defense Department and the military services had a real-time "single integrated picture" of any given battle zone, concluded a study titled "Roadmap to the Single Integrated Picture."

The conclusion of the NORAD exercise was that "we are naked," said Stephen R. Woodall, the director of the study. "We have no capability to deal with that kind of problem."

A single integrated picture, or SIP, would give U.S. military forces access to reliable information about ground, air, space or undersea threats in any given theater of operations, including the continental United Stares, said Woodall.

A SIP, he added, would improve homeland defense. "You need a SIP around the United States." NORAD can see every airplane in the sky and every satellite in space, but that is "nor good enough for cruise missile defense."

Thirty-five companies and 27 defense agencies participated in the study, which was sponsored by the Strike, Land Attack and Air Defense Committee of the National Defense Industrial Association.

Not having a SIP is not any one services fault, said Woodall. "It's a joint problem." The SIP includes six domains: undersea, surface, ground, air, space and cyberspace. "It's a set of synchronized, integrated databases," he explained. "Everyone would use a piece of it."

The lack of interoperability between services and allied forces has been debated for many years, but little progress has been achieved, Woodall said. Many of the obstacles are more political than technical, he added. "[Interoperability] is achievable, if the leadership wants it to be achievable."

As a Navy cruiser commanding officer during the Persian Gulf War, Woodall saw first-hand how the lack of interoperability can hamper military operations. "We had an unreliable surface picture," he said.

The upshot...