In warfare, it's much easier to draw up plans for destroying a target if military planners know what the target is and where it is. But the challenge becomes more daunting when the target is a terrorist training cell or a cluster of chemical or biological weapons—targets that can be, literally, here today and gone tomorrow.

In military parlance, the latter are known as Time Sensitive Targets (TSTs). They can be any number of things—groups of adversaries, missiles, labs—but they have one thing in common: they must be identified and struck within a limited time frame. Thus, not only must the technology guiding each step of the process be up to date, but the communications and decision-making process (often among changing coalition partners) must be streamlined and flexible enough to allow fast action against the enemy.

MITRE is working in partnership with the services to achieve this goal through a research program that involves all the services in joint experiments.

We invited representatives of the Army, Navy, and Air Force to several service laboratories to conduct a series of "simulation experiments." The purpose is to foster greater interoperability among the services in the identification, pursuit, and destruction of TSTs. "By simulating a variety of scenarios involving TSTs and by putting tools and prototypes in the hands of people who will use them in the field, we hope to help improve the ability of joint forces to respond to elusive, sometimes faceless, threats," says James Dear, one of the leaders of the MITRE research team.

"We run these simulations to determine what the right mix of systems should be to support this joint problem," he adds. "What we're trying to do is bring things together ahead of time so that when our troops engage in a war, these systems are ready and interoperating."

TST is an area that is gaining greater interest among the services and for good reason. Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), said 80 percent of the targets the United States identified during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan were TSTs. Future wars—as with the recent conflict with Iraq—could find warfighters representing the United States and a new coalition of partners searching for such TSTs as Scud launchers or mobile laboratories for making chemical or biological weapons. Terrorism naturally produces clandestine TSTs.

"I think the Enduring Freedom contingency operation is making what we're doing a lot more relevant and immediate," says Dear.

Thinking As One

The problem of finding and destroying TSTs goes back to the Gulf War, when the services reported difficulties in taking out Scud missile launchers. Since then, each of the services has worked individually to address TST issues, each working with MITRE in company labs such as the Navy Strike Cell in Virginia, Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, and Fort Monmouth in New Jersey.

In the 1990s, Dear was working on a project called Collaborative Contingency Targeting, a search for ways to enhance the targeting process through collaborative software. In 2001, he and his colleagues proposed that the Army, Navy, and Air Force conduct joint TST experiments. Then he co-sponsored a series of technical exchange meetings among MITRE staff to explore the possibility of fostering a joint research program. The research proposal was accepted and the first of twelve TST experiments began in October 2001, thus enabling MITRE to help the services do jointly what they had been doing separately.

"MITRE's in a unique position," says John SantaPietro, the TST project leader at Fort Monmouth. "We have contacts in all levels of the Department of Defense. We can pull together feedback from across all three services. I think that's really our major contribution—to be the nexus for the Army, Navy, and Air Force capabilities in this area."

MITRE's technical expertise is also put to good use in the experiments. There are a multitude of tools vendors have put forth to improve the flow and quality of information from the sensor to the warfighter at critical steps. During the simulation experiments (SIMEXs), representatives of the services have tested devices aimed at situational awareness, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Management, target development, mission planning, and precise point positioning, among others.

"You will see multiple tools out there," says Dear. "And what we try to do is to bring various tools that relate to these functional areas into experiments across three labs and see how they work." But Fred Stein, director of operations at the MITRE site at Fort Hood, Texas, which participated in three SIMEXs, says the emphasis will be primarily on bringing together tools that already exist.

"The portion of work that we're doing here at Fort Hood does not introduce anything new," Stein says. "It does suggest ways of organizing around the tools differently. There is a concept that discusses something called 'reach' and richness.' If you go into a Borders bookstore, you have a lot of richness as you walk through, pick up a book and examine it. If you go to Amazon, you get tremendous reach with the larger number of publications about gardening or snowplows. This experiment helps us understand how to increase the reach while not sacrificing richness— in fact, adding richness at the same time. So you give more people more services, and you make those services more robust because they share them with other services."

The major unanswered question now is: What will be done with the results of the experiments? Will the things that have been learned from the TST experiments be ready to be applied to the battlefield anytime soon?

From Lab to Battlespace

The research project under which the TST experiments were being conducted has expired, but there are plans to transition sponsorship to the Joint Staff. Dear hopes the experiments will lead to the creation of a Virtual TST Cell, which would include capabilities and functions across the services that might be integrated to support joint operations. MITRE is developing a system description for the Virtual TST Cell, including its functions and the unique applications each cell would bring to the system.

Meanwhile, events abroad have influenced planning for the remaining SIMEXs. Many veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom have taken part in the experiments, using scenarios directly from the caves of Afghanistan and the Iraqi desert. SIMEXs conducted earlier this year featured an Iraqi scenario, complete with computerized images of the country's terrain.

"It's no coincidence that we played on that terrain database," says SantaPietro. "And there are also some aspects of special operations capabilities within the scenarios."

Regardless of which of these tools might ultimately be ready for use on the battlefield, MITRE representatives believe the experiments have already yielded value.

"We've gained lessons learned, e.g, what potential difficulties are likely to arise in an operations scenario, and what are the possible workarounds," says SantaPietro. The research provides the critical capability to understand, in a very closely controlled environment that's basically all-simulation driven, what some of the interoperability issues are when you bring all of these heterogeneous systems from the different services together. You attempt to provide uniform information flow for all the participants involved."

And the chance to provide that flow, backed up by expert knowledge of the technology involved in TST systems, highlights MITRE's role as an independent and authoritative voice.

"You couldn't really turn to one contractor and say, 'We want you to independently look across Air Force, Navy, and Army systems, and expect them to bring the best of what they have in an independent, unbiased manner," says Carlton Rice, project leader for the Central Test and Support Facility at Fort Hood. "We have both the expertise in the individual systems and an unbiased view. We're not looking to gain anything by promoting a given application across the services—we're looking toward a holistic, unbiased approach at trying to solve this inter-service problem."

—by W. Russell Woolard

Related Information

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