Achieving a decision paradigm for distributed warfare resource management

The ability to optimally manage distributed warfare assets for collaborative operation significantly increases our military advantage. The primary results include enhanced situational awareness and improvements in fire control, engagement support, operational planning, combat reaction times, threat prioritization, and the list continues. Bettering the use of sensors and weapons in concert with one another- effectively creating a system of distributed systems-provides major payoffs. The effectiveness of managing distributed resources depends on the ability to make complex decisions. The complexity is due in part to the circuitous nature of fusing data from multiple sensor sources to provide a representation of the operational environment from which to redirect sensors for further information optimization and from which to base military operations. The "goodness" of such complex decisions depends on the "goodness" of the information available and the understanding of the situation from a "big picture" perspective. This paper explores distributed resource management from a decision-based perspective. With an objective of enabling a collaborative system of systems (SoS), a systems approach is proposed to implement a decision paradigm that extends from system conception to operations.