Managing oceanographic information in the military decision-making process

The United States Department of Defense is providing its operating forces the capability to view the environment, described as battlespace awareness, across all nodes of its command and control network. This is important because the different components of the national defense community routinely work together in a coordinated manner with operations synchronized at selected command and control sites. A typical joint operation might involve Marines landing by helicopter from ships under the cover of Air Force aircraft to retrieve US citizens from a country in domestic distress. As the national defense community strives to develop and execute a systems architecture to provide battlespace awareness the importance of including meteorological and oceanographic information in the systems architecture is becoming widely recognized. The Defense Information Systems Agency is fielding the Joint METOC Segment as the foundation upon which to build a comprehensive meteorological and oceanographic product management capability in its command and control system.