Representing Geospatially Enabled Command and Control (C2) Information within the JC3IEDM

The transition to Commander-centric network-enabled Command and Control (C2) is well underway within the US Army and Department of Defense (DOD). The foundation of this approach is an information superiority-enabled concept of operations that describes the way U.S. forces organize and fight in the information age. The idea is to translate this information superiority into combat power by effectively linking friendly forces within the Battlespace, providing a much richer shared awareness of the situation, and enabling more rapid and effective decision making. In order to achieve this type of capability, reliable connectivity must be established among the various types of digitized C2 systems, sensor systems, communications systems, and communications networks. This, however, will only provide half of the required solution. Just as important as connectivity is to this concept is the ability of these systems to discover, consume, understand, and act upon this mission-relevant shared information. This requires that interoperability specifications and standards be established to facilitate shared information understanding among the services, their warfighter domains, and the plethora of disparate digitized systems and networks that constitute the current battlefield. One such area of applicable research involves the integration of geospatial analysis with Army planning and decision making. The purpose of this paper is describe work focused on bringing tailored, actionable geospatial information into the hands of the warfighter using the Joint Consultation, Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (JC3IEDM). The U.S. Army Geospatial Center (AGC) is sponsoring an ongoing effort to develop products and a framework for transforming the volumes of data produced by terrain teams and sensors into information products and tactical decision aids to provide a deeper understanding of the battlefield and including terrain and weather effects. As part of this work a common underlying data representation has been developed and demonstrated as a means of harnessing the analytical power of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and presenting this information to the Warfighter in terms that he can more easily apply to the battle command process. The paper will provide a description of this underlying geospatially enabled C2 representation.