Distributed, Collaborative, Knowledge Based Air Campaign Planning

This paper addresses existing functional needs and current technical opportunities for intelligent automation to support air campaign and theater level planning. In the context of a changing political, military, and acquisition environment, we describe several advanced automation activities that address key shortfalls in situation assessment, force planning, and legacy systems integration. First we describe a joint Air Force Electronic Systems Center (ESC)/MITRE Corporation effort to deal with the "legacy" problem of integrating intelligence and mission planning systems using a common object request broker architecture to enhance intelligence/operations interactions and support evolvable systems in the field. We then describe results from a joint Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA) and Rome Laboratory (RL) initiative aimed at developing the next generation of distributed, collaborative force deployment and force employment planning technology. We then describe another ESC/MITRE effort to develop tools for multisource intelligence integration to support knowledge based, multisensor data fusion and enemy behavior recognition for enhanced situation assessment. Given this context, we then illustrate an integrated vision of a distributed collaborative, knowledge based crisis action planning system, where both machine and human knowledge are utilized synergistically to enhance overall system performance. We summarize lessons learned from these efforts and discuss an evolutionary acquisition process to move the above ideas toward operational realization while minimizing technology transition risk. The article concludes with recommendations for moving forward.