Command Control (sometimes adding in Computing, Communications, Intelligence Surveillance, and Battle Management with abbreviations lumped together as BMCIS) is the task of managing and planning a military operation. It is very similar to the civilian area of Crisis management, where the operations involve combating effects of hurricanes, earthquakes, chemical spills, forest fires, etc. [NRC:96a]. Telemedicine was once considered a video conferencing application, but now this is becoming like command control in the interventional informatics concept [Warner:95a] where the doctor (cf. commander) needs a rich interactive information to win the ``battle'' i.e., treating the patient. Both the military and civilian cases have computational ``nuggets'' where parallel computing is relevant. These include processing sensor data (signal and image processing) and simulations of such things as expected weather patterns and chemical plumes. One also needs large-scale multimedia databases with capabilities similar to these described in Section 4.4.3. We have built a powerful Web based command and control prototype on top of TANGO [Beca:97b], [Fox:97c] that illustrates many of these concepts..
The NII is needed to link military planners and decision makers, crisis managers, experts at so-called anchor desks, workers (warriors) in the field, information sources such as cable news feeds, and large-scale database and simulation engines.
A key characteristic of the required NII support is adaptivity. Crises and battles can occur anywhere and destroy an arbitrary fraction of the existing infrastructure. Adaptivity means making the best use of the remaining links, but also deploying and integrating well mobile enhancements. The information infrastructure must exhibit security and reliability or at least excellent fault tolerance (adaptivity). Network management must deal with the unexpected capacity demands and real time constraints. Priority schemes must allow when needed critical information (such as chemical plume monitoring and military sensor data) precedence over less time critical information, such as background network video footage.
Needed computing resources will vary from portable handheld systems to large backend MPPs. As there will be unpredictable battery (power) and bandwidth constraints, it is important that uniform user interfaces and similar services be available on all platforms with, of course, the fidelity and quality of a service reflecting the intrinsic power of a given computer. As with the communications infrastructure, we must cope with unexpected capacity demands. As long as the NII is deployed nationally, computational capacity can be exploited in remote sites. The Department of Defense envisages using the basic NII (GII) infrastructure for command and control, augmented by ``theater extensions'' to bring needed communications into critical areas. The ``take it as it is'' characteristic of command and control requires that operating systems and programming models support a general adaptive mix (metacomputer) of coordinated geographically distributed but networked computers. This network will adaptively link available people (using perhaps personal digital assistants) to large-scale computation on MPPs and other platforms. There are large computational requirements when forecasting in real-time physical phenomena, such as the weather effects on a projected military action, forest fires, hurricanes, and the structure of damaged buildings. On a longer time scale, simulation can be used for contingency planning and capability assessment. Training with simulated virtual worlds supporting televirtuality, requires major computational resources. In the information arena, applications include datamining to detect anomalous entries (outliers) in large federated multimedia databases. Data fusion including sensor input and processing, geographical information systems (with perhaps three-dimensional terrain rendering), and stereo reconstruction from multiple video streams are examples of compute intensive image processing forming part of the needed Web-based distributed collaborative computing environment.
A critical need for information management involves the best possible high-level extraction of knowledge from databanks--the crisis manager must make judgments in unexpected urgent situations--we cannot carefully tailor and massage data ahead of time. Rather, we need to search a disparate set of multimedia databases. As well as knowledge extraction from particular information sources, the systematic use of metadata allowing fast coarse grain searching is very important. This is a specific example of the importance of standards in expediting access to ``unexpected'' databases. One requires access to databases specific to crisis region or battlefield, and widespread availability of such geographic and community information in electronic form is essential. There are very difficult policy and security issues, for many of these databases need to be made instantly available in a hassle-free fashion to the military commander or crisis manager--this could run counter to proprietary and security classification constraints. The information system should allow both network news and warriors in the field to deposit in near real-time, digital versions of their crisis and battlefield videos and images. Web linked databases should make this universal convenient access more feasible.
As mentioned, we expect that human and computer expertise to be available in ``anchor desks'' to support instant decisions in the heat of the battle. These have been used in a set of military exercises called JWID (Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstrations). We note that this information scenario is a real-time version of the InfoVISiON service needed to support the society of the Information Age.
Command and Control has historically used distributed computing, as the relevant computer and communication resources, are naturally distributed, and not centralized into a single MPP. We see this growing into a Web-based information infrastructure for all the nation's enterprises, including business, education, and society.