SpaceComm, COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. 25 January 2007. The war the U.S. is fighting today "will not be won with kinetic weapons but non-kinetic weapons," U.S. Navy Vice Adml. Nancy Brown, director of command, control, communications, and computers told the audience at the SpaceComm 2007 symposium today during her keynote address last evening. Brown was referring to the theme of the conference: "Information Dominance through Knowledge Management."
The key to information knowledge management will be the joint efforts among different levels of the military involving network-centric operations, she said. "Knowledge management is crucial to observation and orientation on the battlespace," she said. Secure access inside and outside will provide situational awareness across all operations, Brown added.
Knowledge management enables users to target specific information to meet mission requirements with a digital format that is easier for them to view and use, Brown said.
She gave an example involving weather data in Iraq. Brown said they had a problem recently where aircraft were coming back from missions with unused weapons and other equipment due to poor weather. She described how the report went from a purely text piece of data to a graphical map to a graphical map with intuitive and easy to understand interactive text that pinpointed weather in particular areas on the graphical map. This brought "knowledge of immediate value not only to pilots and planners but commanders as well," Brown said.
Once the new graphical map was in use the number of aircraft coming back with unused equipment dropped to nearly zero, Brown said.
Brown also listed the destruction of a bridge heading into the Iraqi palace that is now Camp Victory as an operation that may have been aided by knowledge management techniques. She said that if all possible data and information on the palace and its potential as a military base of operations had been known ahead of time the bridge may not had to have been destroyed and then rebuilt, saving resources.
For enhanced warfighting rapid access to information info is needed, it cannot be horded, she said. In many cases a culture change is needed to accomplish this, she added. "The first goal is to win not gather information for gathering information's sake," Brown said just before she closed her speech.
