Towards a cyber common operating picture

Commanders enjoy a refined common operating picture of the kinetic battlespace. While still imperfect, today's military command posts represent centuries of refinement and maturation enhanced by cutting-edge technology. Cyberspace's emergence as an operational domain, however, presents unresolved challenges to this status quo. Techniques for maintaining situational awareness and command and control of cyber operations, particularly joint cyber/kinetic operations, are ill-defined, and no current solutions provide military decision-makers with a comprehensive cyber common operating picture, or CCOP. This paper provides a framework for designing such systems. We focus on the problem of cyber-only operations as well as joint cyber-kinetic operations. Our analysis indicates that the CCOP problem is tractable, but non-trivial, requiring substantial effort realized through evolutionary and revolutionary research approaches.