Since the turn of the decade NATO has made major improvements in the architecture supporting maritime command and control (C2). As late as the early 1990s, shore-based NATO commanders exercized command and control over their operating forces at sea more or less as had been done during World War II: via paper signals, grease-pencil status boards, metal-backed map boards, and magnetic pucks—representing ships and aircraft—that were moved about by sailors on tall ladders.
In only the last few years—since about 1993—all this has changed. Now, maritime command and control is performed via satellites, wide-area networks, computerized tactical data processors and machine-readable messages. The Maritime Command and Control Information System (MCCIS) has emerged as the C2 tool of choice for NATO's maritime component commanders. Operations in Bosnia resulted in the development of CRONOS (Crisis Response Operations in NATO Open Systems), and the NATO Initial Data Transfer Service (NIDTS) network also has come into being.
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