Survivable Command, Control and Communication

To support future command and control (C²) concepts, military telecommunications and information processing must change significantly. Highly automated and integrated communications and processing systems will be required, which must be able to manage and reconstitute themselves at the network level and the internetwork level if the survivable C² architectures required by the military are going to be developed. Emerging technologies in automated communication-resource management, distributed processing, and artificial intelligence (AI) will provide the foundation for building such systems. With these technologies, a battlefield information-management environment can be developed that will readily support distributed, self-managing and self-reconstituting, and, hence, survivable, C². The series of papers presented in this MILCOM \´87 session entitled "Distributed Systems" were invited to address the theme of survivable command, control and communication (C³). Although one could anticipate a myriad of papers and topics related to such a broad theme, I have selected a series of papers that focus on advanced research and development of technologies related to a conceptual model that I developed as a result of several years of involvement with distributed processing and communications research for tactical and strategic survivable C³. This model and its relevance to survivable C³ are presented in my paper, which introduces the session. This model provides a framework for the six papers that will be presented, which are shown below. 1. "Multi-Destination Protocols for Tactical Radio Networks" by Edgar Caples, Rockwell International. 2.