Towards a cyber common operating picture

Commanders enjoy a refined common operating picture of the kinetic battlespace. While still imperfect, today´s military command posts represent centuries of refinement and maturation enhanced by cutting-edge technology. Cyberspace´s emergence as an operational domain, however, presents unresolved challenges to this status quo. Techniques for maintaining situational awareness and command and control of cyber operations, particularly joint cyber/kinetic operations, are ill-defined, and no current solutions provide military decision-makers with a comprehensive cyber common operating picture, or CCOP. This paper provides a framework for designing such systems. We focus on the problem of cyber-only operations as well as joint cyber-kinetic operations. Our analysis indicates that the CCOP problem is tractable, but non-trivial, requiring substantial effort realized through evolutionary and revolutionary research approaches.