Editor's note: This story was updated at 5:30 p.m. Jan. 29, 2007. Please go to Corrections & Clarifications to see what has changed.
The U.S. military increasingly relies on the network for fighting battles on the ground and in cyberspace. But cyber commanders in southwest Asia don’t yet have the tools they need to harness the power of the network to wage war.
Air Force network operators need better situational awareness when doling out technology resources, according to a junior officer who recently returned from the Central Command area of operations. They must be able to determine which ground forces receive valuable bandwidth and network access as they perform real-world missions.
The military will also need the ability to see and track allied forces in the network to fight future wars in cyberspace -- a virtual version of the blue force tracking capability commanders use in the physical world to mark and identify friendly forces on the battlefield and to transmit that picture over the network.
“We need a Blue Force Tracker for cyberspace,” said Air Force Capt. Brian Hobbs, deputy chief of the Directors Action Group at Air Combat Command headquarters’ communications directorate at Langley Air Force Base, Va. Hobbs was speaking Jan. 25 at the Network Centric Warfare Conference hosted by the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium in Washington, D.C.
In 2006, Hobbs was chief watch officer at CENTCOM’s Theater Communications Control Center in Bahrain. In that role, he was tasked to authorize network disruptions caused by limited bandwidth or system maintenance.
But Hobbs couldn’t perform the impact analysis to determine the consequences of his actions, he said. He feared warfighters engaged in battle operations might lose their communications through his actions.
Impact analysis should be automated, with a focus on speed and ease of use, Hobbs said. “I need a matter-of-fact representation, which conveys the impact of something happening on the network,” he said. “I need to see, visually, my cyber assets.”
Warfighters in Iraq and Afghanistan praise BFT for giving them enhanced awareness on the battlefield. The system increases decision-making power, reduces response times, helps coordinate air support, and prevents friendly fire accidents, many soldiers said.
Perhaps most significantly, BFT drives decision making down the command chain, allowing junior officers to react to events without consulting senior officers who are removed from the action.
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