Exploring Information Superiority: A Methodology for Measuring the Quality of Information and Its Impact on Shared Awareness

Abstract : The military is formulating new visions, strategies, and concepts that capitalize on emerging information-age technologies to provide its warfighters with significantly improved capabilities to meet the national security challenges of the 21st century. These programs are described in such documents as the Quadrennial Defense Review, Joint Vision 2020, a variety of publications describing network-centric warfare (NCW), and other documents describing military transformation. Joint Vision 2020 provides an important starting point for describing a future warfighting concept that has since evolved into NCW. A key tenet of Joint Vision 2020 is that information superiority will enable decision dominance, new Joint operational concepts, and a decisive advantage over future adversaries. To create and leverage information superiority, it is foreseen that, under some circumstances, a mix of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities would interoperate with weapon systems and forces on an end-to-end basis through a network-centric information environment to achieve significant improvements in awareness, shared awareness, and synchronization. The military is embarked on a series of analyses and experiments to improve its understanding of the potential of these NCW concepts. The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration (ASD NII), through the Command and Control Research Program, asked RAND to help develop methods and tools that could improve the assessment of C4ISR capabilities and processes to the achievement of NCW concepts, including awareness, shared awareness, and synchronization. In response to this request, the RAND Corporation has been participating in the Information Superiority Metrics Working Group, under the auspices of ASD NII. The group s purpose is to describe key concepts and related metrics that are necessary to explore part of the proposed NCW value chain.