Achieving Actionable Information in a Complex Operational Environment
(Room S320F)
28 Nov 17
2:00 PM
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2:30 PM
During operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere over the last decade, one significant lesson has been learned: a failure to recognize, acknowledge, and accurately define the operational environment (OE) led to a mismatch between forces, capabilities, missions, and goals. Fortunately, warfighters and senior leaders were able to overcome the information technology (IT) capability shortfalls through materiel and non-materiel solutions -- building relationships with the local population and key leader engagements, creating fusion cells to assimilate operations and intelligence information, and expanding the use of liaison officers. The Afghan Mission Network (AMN) (Serena, Porche, Predd, Osburg, & Lossing, 2014) is one solution which has had long-lasting impacts on how we, as a joint and multinational force, come together to share data. It has led to the NATO Federated Mission Networking (FMN) concepts, and the US contribution to FMN, the Mission Partner Environment (MPE).
Sharing OE information with mission partners in an FMN/MPE promotes unity of effort and effectiveness across interagency, coalition, host-nation partners, think tanks, academia, commercial entities, and non-governmental organizations. Fielding IT data services in an enterprise environment that automates mining and extracting missionrelevant data from vast amounts of restricted and open source repositories is prerequisite to fully understanding a complex OE. This political, military, economic, social, information, and infrastructure (PMESII) data about a specific geospatial location at a point in time must be integrated and transformed into actionable information that considers second-order effects.
This paper will describe the Joint Staff and Army’s collaborative approach to leverage and horizontally integrate Combatant Command, military Service, DOD Agency, and multinational capabilities as enterprise solutions that advance a comprehensive understanding of a complex OE; supporting decision