|
Items in cart [0] |
Questions? Call 888-624-8373 |
PAPERBACK PDF BOOK Free Resources |
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2009. National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Terms of Use and Privacy Statement |
Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 87
Conclusions and Recommendations
This chapter summarizes the major conclusions and
recommendations that appeared in the preceding
chapters.
CONCLUSIONS
The committee related each of the Army's functional
requirements in Chapter 2 to technology building blocks
identified in Chapter 3. For each building block technol-
ogy, the committee provided recommendations as to
whether the Anny should adopt commercial technology
(C), adapt (modify) commercial technology (M), or de-
velop A~y-specific technologies (A) to meet its needs.
The rationale for making these recommendations was
From the many expressions of Army requirements for also provided.
future command, control, communications, and intelli
gence, the committee distilled six important Army needs
for operational capabilities. These capabilities are neces-
sary in order to realize those aspects of the vision of the
Army of the future that are related to information acqui-
sition, movement, management, and access. These needs
are (1) improved situational awareness, (2) common
relevant picture of the battlefield, (3) command on-the-
move, (4) improved target handoff, (5) battle space
expansion, and (6) information protection. A seventh
need, to exploit modeling and simulation, was also
considered because of its general importance to the Anny
and relevance to this study.
To help the Army satisfy its needs, there is a set of
commercial multimedia building block technologies that
collectively support a broad range of generic applica-
tions. Trends associated with these technologies (mostly
qualitative, but also quantitative) indicate that a substan-
tial level of research and development effort by compa-
nies will be put into these technologies over the next
decade. This level of effort driven by commercial appli-
cations is likely to exceed greatly the amount of research
and development effort that can be afforded by the Army.
Thus, commercial requirements rather than Army needs
are the principal determinants of the future directions
taken by these technologies.
The committee defined a generic multimedia architec-
ture that is useful for putting the building block technolo-
gies in perspective. This architecture has, from bottom to
top, five layers. A sixth layer involving management and
security cuts across the other five. The Anny's needs tend
to align most strongly with commercial needs in the
middle layers (II to IV). The Army's unique needs tend
to lie in Layers I and V, with some special requirements
and concerns in Layer VI.
87
There are several ways in which advanced multimedia
technologies might be employed in the first decade of the
next century to support the Army of the future at the corps
level and below. These were illustrated in a scenario
depicting battle command in the twenty-first century.
The committee's analysis of the prognosis for the
realization of the battlefield capabilities contained in the
operational scenario considered the use of both commer-
cial off-the-shelf technologies and technologies that
might be created by Army-specific research and devel-
opment investments. For the most part, however, the
future capabilities will be determined by trends in com-
mercial technologies.
In addition, the committee identified some important
projections regarding the broader implications of the
application of multimedia technologies at the corps-level
and below; these implications go beyond mere improve-
ments in the ability to acquire, process, and communicate
information. Specifically, the committee forecasts
changes in organization, doctrine, and tactics as well as
the need to actively experiment and to iteratively design
and develop.
The committee developed a technology management
strategy for the Army. The recommendations that follow
constitute the key elements for this strategy.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Based on its understanding of Anny plans and needs
related to the battlefield and the current capabilities and
future trends in commercial-off-the-shelf multimedia in-
forrnation technologies, the committee makes the follow-
ing recommendations. The committee acknowledges that
OCR for page 88
g8
COMMERCIAL MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGIES FOR -FIRST CE~YA~YBA~IF[Os
some of the recommendations have been made before,
but it wishes to reiterate them to add weight to these
recommendations in the hope of accelerating their im-
plementation and to add specific support for them in the
context of applications of multimedia information tech-
nologies. In particular, the committee believes that these
recommendations are specifically relevant to multimedia
information technologies and applications because of the
very short time scales within which these technologies
evolve and because of the widespread application of
these technologies in commercial domains.
Recommendlation 1: The Army should be a
hunter-gatherer of technologies, seeking out and
acquiring the best technologies wherever it can find
them, to meet its overall strategic objectives, and
applying them in an opportunistic manner to meet
the demands of the battlefield. The Army should
leverage commercial-off-the-shelf technology (i.e.,
design applications and systems that can utilize
such technology rather than setting objectives and
requirements that require the invention of nonex-
istent technology>. The Army should not compete
with the commercial sector in developing generi-
cally applicable technology.
Recommendlation 2: The Army should carefully
distinguish between (a) those technologies that are
emerging and evolving in the commercial market-
place and will be available to everyone, including
the Army's adversaries, and (b) those technologies
that the Army can reasonably expect to create as
competitive enablers to differentiate the Army from
its adversaries. For those technologies that fall in
the former category, the Army should focus on
expediting and experimenting with their innovative
use in battlefield applications as a means of pro-
ducing competitive advantage. For those technolo-
gies that fall into the latter category, the Army
should invest in Army-proprietary research and
development efforts to achieve the desired differ-
entiating advantages. The committee has provided
specific recommendations in Chapter 4 of this
report regarding which multimedia information
technologies fall into the former category, the latter
category, or a combination of both. These recom-
mendations were summarized in Table 4-4.
Recommendation 3: The Army must achieve a
better balance in its procurement processes be-
tween the imperative to make these processes fair
and competitive and the imperative to effectively
acquire, insert, and deploy information technolo-
gies whose life cycles can be as low as 18 months.
Specifically, the Army must recognize the iterative
interaction between requirements and what is tech-
nically feasible. Setting rigid requirements for sys-
tems years in advance of their likely deployment
will result in the deployment of obsolete technolo-
gies with their associated cost and performance
penalties, lost opportunities to deploy capabilities
that were not anticipated or not believed to be
feasible at the time requirements were set, and
wasted efforts in the development of technologies
that duplicate those that become commercially
available at lower costs and have better perform-
ance.
Recommendlation 4: The Army should create and
enforce a technical architecture that (a) promotes
the reuse of building block technologies across
multiple systems, interoperability between systems,
and expedited insertion of new technologies to
achieve cost reductions and performance improve-
ments, and (b) facilitates ad hoc modifications of
applications and capabilities to meet short-term
needs in crisis situations. The Army must provide
incentives to program managers and contractors to
make the short-term investments needed to imple-
ment systems and building blocks that are compli-
ant with the architecture in order to realize the
long-term benefits articulated above.
Recommendation 5: The Army should be an
active participant in technology development in the
commercial sector. The Army should access infor-
mation regarding commercial technology trends,
influence commercial technology trends to accom-
modate Army-specific requirements, and proac-
tively endeavor to benefit from commercial
experiences and innovations in the application of
technology.
Recommendation 6: The Army should respond to
the need for reinvention. It should expect that rapid
advances in communications and computational
capabilities resulting from trends in commercial
multimedia technologies will result in more than
quantitative improvement in the ability of soldiers
and commanders to execute existing command and
control paradigms. It is likely that the Army will
have to reinvent its organizations, doctrines, and
tactics related to command and control to leverage
these rapidly evolving technologies and to remain
competitive with its adversaries.
OCR for page 89
CONCLUSIOI`JS AND RECOMMEI~DATIOI\iS
Recommendation 7: The Army must adopt a
spiral model of development where the iterative
specification of requirements, prototyping, testing
by users, and refinement/respecification of require-
ments proceeds in periods measured in months to
create new systems and applications. This process
must make heavy use of simulation, modeling, and
experimentation in order to achieve the desired
89
iteration speeds and to achieve realistic prototyping
and desired user feedback.
Recommendation 8: The Army should create and
adopt an appropriate qualitative index as a means
to measure progress made toward achieving its
technology management goals.
OCR for page 90
Representative terms from entire chapter:
commercial technology
