Common relevant operational picture : an analysis of effects on the prosecution of time-critical targets

• Main Author: Johnson, Charles A.
• Other Authors: Pilnick, Steven E.
• Published: Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/6048

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited === The conceptual template laid out in Joint Vision 2010 called for leveraging technological opportunities to achieve new and higher levels of effectiveness in a joint operating environment. Born out of this concept the U.S. Joint Forces Command developed a concept - the Common Relevant Operational Picture, or CROP. It is a presentation of timely, fused, accurate, assured and relevant information. The CROP concept addresses battlespace awareness, information transport and processing, combat identification and joint command and control - four of the six high priority challenges identified by the Joint Staff for the 21st century. This thesis investigates CROP, comparing and contrasting it to uncoordinated separate service systems in a time-critical targeting setting. The Measures of Effectiveness (MOEs) used are the time to kill a target and the number of weapons expended. Previous work on this problem used an analytical model with some simplifying assumptions concerning processing time latency following target detection. In this thesis, a simulation is used to investigate the validity of some of the analytical model assumptions. The simulation also extends the model for more general command and control time distributions and models Battle Damage Assessment. The results provide distributional information about the MOEs, showing how improvements in information sharing and optimal weapons assignment due to CROP can improve systems performance. However, this improvement is lost if processing time latency under CROP is too long.