William B Osborne

Information Operations: a New War-fighting Capability William B Osborne

Publisher Marketing: In its most basic form, commanders have always performed the functions of observe, orient, decide, and act (OODA Loop) to prosecute military operations. As with Alexander the Great, history shows the military commander who best analyzes, decides, and controls the speed of the engagement prevails in nearly every conflict. To master the OODA Loop, military leaders have pushed technology to obtain more information. Ironically, this now leads to the requirement to solve two fundamental challenges if the United States expects to maintain air and space dominance in 2025. First, the proliferation of unintegrated military warfighting architectures gives the commander potentially conflicting perspectives of the battlespace. Second, the explosion of available information creates an environment of mental overload leading to flawed decision making. Failure to master these challenges critically weakens the military instrument of power. This paper presents a solution to these challenges confronting commanders as they employ future airpower forces. Regarding the first challenge, the large number of specialized warfighting architectures makes information integration supporting overall coordination and control more important and more difficult. Simultaneously, the speed and the range of modern weapons drastically reduces the time commanders have to integrate conflicting information and decide on a course of action. The second challenge is to harness the information explosion to combat mental overload, thus improving decision making. Recent exercises reveal an alarming number of unread messages because of information overload. As the quantity of data rises, the difficulty of preparing and interpreting it for decision making grows. Traditionally, the military attempted to solve this problem by increasing the number of communications nodes. These past solutions only injected additional inputs and information without improving decision making capability. The optimum solution must integr