1. Situational Awareness

The tool needed to support this requirement must generate a complete picture of the current and likely future situation. It includes both an operational mission component and a non-mission, regional or global component. All elements of the situation are included: red elements (threat, both human and natural, e.g., volcanoes), white (ostensibly neutral) elements, and blue (allied) elements. The factors that must be considered include location, intent, cultural and political environment, potential flashpoints, and centers of gravity.

The tool must support analysis of infrastructure status, evaluation of physical disaster effects, and display of engineering density predictions. This tool helps evaluate general support requirements, migrant interdiction, people's reactions to disaster effects, personnel tracking and locating, and visualization of refugee flows. Existing models and data, e.g. environmental, demographic, health, and other complex models require specialized support, which is not readily available to the CINC users. The tool must permit rapid update of locations of forces and population centers needing support. The tool requirements are provided by the OOTW analysis tasks that it must support.

· Provide instability forecast, impact forecast (psycho-social), task # 1.1: Forecast the regions of potential instability, the predicted dates, the related probabilities, and the nature of the instabilities. Forecast the impact of various actions, both those intended to be remedial and otherwise.

· Estimate readiness, task # 2.6: Estimate the readiness of U.S. military forces, U.S. agency elements, and coalition elements to perform the mission.

· Perform intelligence collection and ISR, task # 3.10: Define Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) needs and collect information and intelligence to support the mission, including information concerning threat, friendly and neutral elements and environmental information.

· Establish cultural awareness, task # 3.11: Establish and maintain awareness of significant cultural issues.

· Establish red teams, task # 3.12: Establish teams to think as opposition forces, providing realistic opposing courses of action.

· Perform METT-T analysis, task # 3.13: Perform complete METT-T analysis.

· Identify centers of gravity, task # 3.14: Identify locations at which minimal actions will produce maximal results, both desirable and undesirable.

· Estimate threat, task # 3.15: Estimate the nature and severity of threats to mission success.

· Support media / public affairs, task # 3.16: Provide media and public affairs support.

· Execute PSYOPs, task # 3.17: Conduct psychological operations (PSYOPs) (both benign and offensive) to induce desired actions.

· Assess casualties and perform medical treatment analyses, task # 5.4: Analyze casualty and medical treatment data to support Course of Action (COA) development and Measure of Effectiveness (MOE) assessment.

· Identify infrastructure improvement requirements, task # 5.5: Identify infrastructure improvements needed to conduct the mission and needed under the humanitarian or nation building aspects of the mission.

· Provide indigenous/client/refugee support, task # 6.7: Provide support to ensure the safety of civilians. This includes location tracking.

This is primarily a display tool to support decision making. The priority is 2; modelability is rated as Yellow (Y); and the data availability is rated as Very Hard (V). The recommended action is to start work on the tool.

Several requirements support similar tasks and are distinguished as follows. The Situational Awareness requirement addresses the presentation of the information specified in the tasks it supports. The three principal information components that are required are the COA analysis, the impact analysis, and the transition planning and tracking of operational data. The Course of Action analysis requirement refers to that part of Impact Analysis having to do with the impact of actions proposed by US military forces on the immediate operation (including long term consequences). The thrust of the analysis is to determine the best course of action possible. The Impact Analysis requirement is generally broader in scope than COA analysis. At the OSD/Joint Staff level, it involves all governmental and non-governmental actions that may create or exacerbate situations that may lead to the necessity of OOTWs. Conversely, it also involves all governmental and non-governmental actions that may prevent or ameliorate situations that could lead to OOTWs. In addition, it involves environmental conditions that may generate situations leading to OOTWs, such as droughts. At the CINC and JTF levels, Impact Analysis may be principally concerned with ensuring that cultural sensitivities are observed, such as prohibitions against male obstetricians. The Transition Planning and Tracking of Operational Data requirement refers to the part of the COA analysis related to ending the military involvement in the operation (transition planning) and maintaining current values for important MOEs.

The table below will be updated as information is posted on the bulletin board for each requirement.

Table 1. Situation Awareness Tools

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