Failure to master these challenges critically weakens the military instrument of power. This paper presents a solution to these challenges confronting commanders as they employ future airpower forces. Regarding the first challenge, the large number of specialized warfighting architectures makes information integration supporting overall coordination and control more important and more difficult. Simultaneously, the speed and the range of modern weapons drastically reduces the time commanders have to integrate conflicting information and decide on a course of action. The second challenge is to harness the information explosion to combat mental overload, thus improving decision making.
Recent exercises reveal an alarming number of unread messages because of information overload.
As the quantity of data rises, the difficulty of preparing and interpreting it for decision making grows. Traditionally, the military attempted to solve this problem by increasing the number of communications nodes. These past solutions only injected additional inputs and information without improving decision making capability. The optimum solution must integrate the functions within the OODA Loop and allow the commander to control the momentum of the cycle. This paper describes how a system called the Cyber Situation can do just that, thus optimizing commanders ability to operate air and space systems.