The Foundation of Command and Control

A major tenet of Network Centric Warfare is “Information Dominance. ” The accuracy and availability of position information directly affects operational effectiveness. The traditional role of positioning was for “own ship ” pilotage. That is, “can I get from Point A to Point B? ” The evolving role of positioning is as a shared resource to establish nearperfect Situation Awareness (SA) to enhance Command and Control (C2). C2 systems such as the Army Battle Command Systems (ABCS) rely on digitized position reports from all platforms on the battlefield. The predominate source of that position data is the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS). GPS provides a common consistent coordinate reference. GPS accuracy does not degrade with time or distance traveled as self-contained navigation units, e.g. Inertial Navigation Units (INU) or Doppler Radar Navigation Sets. In addition, GPS receivers are significantly less expensive to integrate, operate and maintain than INU’s or Doppler’s. GPS has vulnerabilities to Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI) and satellite signal blockage. Technology initiatives are concentrating on investigating sophisticated integration techniques for combining externally-aided and self-contained navigation systems. This paper addresses the relationship of navigation systems to command and control systems and recent/new technology initiatives to improve the robustness of position information