'Information fusion' key to winning wars.

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 expansion (1,000 times more capable). This upgrade--combined with the Transformational Satellite System and the Joint Tactical Radio System--should provide the interoperability and bandwidth necessary for net-centric operations. As the Air Force Chief John Jumper has reminded us, we need more machine-to-machine communication to free up time for decision-making in our command centers. We need good integration of all of this to support the "family of interoperable operation pictures," which the enterprise badly needs.

The obvious question then becomes: what does all this mean for the defense industry? The answer is that companies must continue m change the way they do business.

Much change already is happening. Boeing, for example, is no longer just an airplane manufacturer, but a "lead systems integrator" for the Future Combat Systems, a linchpin of the Army's transition to network-centric operations. Meanwhile, the nation's industry giants--including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon--are working to set common standards and architectures to facilitate interoperability.

"Companies have had a very platform-centric orientation," said Ernie Snowden, director of business development at Northrop Grumman. That culture quickly is changing. To make their programs relevant, companies are focused on "optimizing" platforms to extract better war-fighting capabilities, Snowden said. They also are developing Web-based "publish and subscribe" operating environments for commanders to exchange information and provide updates as events unfield on the battlefield.

Adapting to the network-centric paradigm is no easy task, both from the management and technical standpoints. As Snowden pointed out, implementing this vision requires a different approach to systems engineering.

Clearly, net-centric operations require industry to adopt a different perspective. NDIA has led several efforts in this arena. The Systems Engineering Division is actively involved in bringing government and industry together to solve interoperability issues, leading an industry effort in support of the "joint battle management command and control roadmap" being developed by JFCOM, due out this month. AFEI, our affiliate association focused on enterprise integration, is driving industry input into the Defense Department's "net-centric enterprise services program" (NCES) and pushing architecture convergence through the Net-Centric Operations Industry Forum. Last year, the NDIA C4ISR Division worked with major suppliers of unmanned air vehicles on a study addressing common and standard UAV architectures. That study has been forwarded to a Defense Department UAV task force that currently is working to engender cross-service cooperation.

In the end, what matters is what the war fighter needs to achieve success. As Operation Iraqi Freedom showed, net-centric capabilities are key. As joint operations cease to be the exception and become the rule, die challenge for both military and industry leaders is to help define and deliver those capabilities through systems--like the ones described above--that exchange information in a seamless and transparent manner.

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