Winning Tactical Engagements in Contested Environments through C5ISRT Dominance

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) Precision Strike Mission Area envisions a 2030 battlespace in which physical domains (e.g., land, maritime, air, and space) and the information domain are heavily contested and strongly coupled in terms of effects and outcomes. Creating a decisive advantage in this battlespace involves building command, control, communications, computing, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting (C5ISRT) systems that provide a more complete, clear, accurate, current, assured, and accessible operating picture than an adversary's picture. To this end, this article proposes a new control and analytical framework that views a C5ISRT system as a cognitive dynamical system with a perception-action cycle that continually and collaboratively orchestrates its resources to optimize the situational awareness available for tactical decision-making. The article describes a vision for research and development in battlespace awareness control and anti-control to achieve continuous universal targeting with impunity. We refer to the resulting decisive advantage as C5ISRT dominance.