Disaster for the U.S. Marines on Tarawa was a tragic lesson on what the lack of meteorological and oceanographic knowledge could bring. During the more recent Gulf War, Allied access to environmental information put an overwhelming number of missiles on target with very little loss of life during actual combat. Using MOSS, these warfighters were able to provide near real time and realistic forecasts for the entire exercise area. In a real war, MOSS can be carried into the field. Once this data was in the victor's data base, other applications running on MOSS were able to provide platform and sensor characteristics and behaviors in the exercise area.
MOSS is made up of commercial hardware and software.
Integrated into the black carrying case are the keyboard, mouse, high resolution flat panel display, all the processors, two 300 MB disk drives, a floppy drive, and the VME chassis. Toll's MOSS demonstration showed the potential to provide any mobile or forward based combat unit an ability to fully integrate real weather into command and control, either during simulations or during real conflicts. Planned interfaces within the MOSS system include geostationary environmental satellite images, radiosondes, expendable bathythermographs, portable and transportable communications, cellular and conventional dial up modems, TESS, and tactical communications. Used by forecasters, TESS is able to process weather and ocean data from all over the world.