Proposing a Common Operational Picture for Joint Operational Practitioners

by Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew J. Duncan, CD

INTRODUCTION;^{Footnote 1}

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) draft Pan-Domain Force Employment Concept recognizes that the CAF is primarily configured to counter overt military actions in the traditional domains of land, sea and air by recognizable elements of an adversary’s armed forces. However, most of Canada’s adversaries are eschewing costly and attributable direct military confrontation in favour of challenging the current rules-based international order within the cyber, space and information domains. These domains provide sufficient opportunities for Canada’s adversaries because the generally accepted levels of conduct remain ambiguous and attribution is often difficult. At the same time, democratic states are hesitant to act due to the domestic social contracts within which they operate. Despite these challenges, the Pan-Domain Force Employment Concept highlights the requirement to campaign across all the domains, coordinating actions between global, regional and targeted operation areas.^{Footnote 2} 

Commanders and their staffs working within the operational level of war must be able to link developments across many domains and levels of war to exploit fleeting opportunities. Although some of Canada’s adversaries have had tangible successes in linking the cyber, information, and land, maritime and air domains together in the past, the clumsiness of their methods has become apparent over time.^{Footnote 3}  The future may be much less forgiving as adversaries refine their methods. In short, a country’s ability to understand the pan-domain environment, draw out linkages between the domains and levels of war, detect fleeting opportunities, synchronize disparate actions and exploit the combined effects are essential to winning. Despite this, significant doctrinal gaps remain within the CAF which stand in the way of fulfilling this requirement from the draft Pan-Domain Force Employment Concept. Specifically, there is still no widely understood and doctrinally accepted method of assembling and depicting an operational-level common operational picture (COP).

This article aims to outline a simplified yet effective method for COP generation from first principles to enable decision making at the operational level of war, both within the traditional (land, air, sea) and non-traditional (cyber, information, space) domains. Staff can take an operational-level commander’s operational problem and concept of operations (CONOPS) and use deductive reasoning to break down the commander’s operational problem into information requirements and data points. These can then be harnessed to engineer automated and manual reporting systems that, through the use of logical induction, can be visually depicted in such a way as to build a common situational understanding that better enables decision making.

It should be noted that most of the ideas contained in this article are not entirely original. In fact, most of the ideas guiding this work are derived from both superseded and current military doctrine. This is encouraging, as it means that a firm foundation exists for innovation within non-traditional domains. However, the author has observed that, when confronted with an operational problem, staff typically do not methodically use the tools provided in military doctrine. In this case, the Canadian military doctrine regarding intelligence collection planning forms a significant base for the ideas that will be examined below.^{Footnote 4} 

The article concentrates on information requirements mainly linked to friendly forces, as the intelligence collection planning process has been well covered. Also, the article refrains from recommending visualization options for COPs, but it will provide general suggestions on how to choose one. When developing solutions for commanders, experts in the non-traditional domains of space, cyber and information should reflect on the unique nature of their domains and how they interact with others.

Within Canada’s joint doctrine publications, the term “common operational picture” is often used but rarely examined in any detail.^{Footnote 5}  A search in Termium Plus reveals a recent (2018) definition of the term: “a shared and dynamic representation of information that can be tailored to facilitate situational awareness, collaborative planning, and decision-making.”^{Footnote 6}  The term “situational awareness” is further defined in Termium Plus as “the knowledge of the elements of the operational environment necessary to make well-informed decisions,” providing further context.^{Footnote 7}  Likewise, the recognized military definition of planning is “the selection of courses of action to attain organization objectives, through a systematic consideration of all alternatives.”^{Footnote 8} 

It is clear from the definitions that a COP is geared towards two closely related ends. The first is the creation of a “shared” representation of information, which acts as a means to synchronize military actions both vertically and horizontally, resulting in increased internal efficiency and greater external effects. Second, and most important, is enabling decision making, which links back to the stated requirement for a COP to be both dynamic^{Footnote 9}  and tailorable.^{Footnote 10}  Ideally, a COP should allow commanders to use what Carl von Clausewitz called their coup d’œil, that is, to understand and exploit fleeting opportunities in time within and across the domains assigned to them.^{Footnote 11}  This includes not only the physical battle spaces but also non-physical opportunities that may be perceptible only through a correlation of elements.

Within the traditional operational-level domains, COPs have evolved based on the cumulative experience of generations of military officers specializing in those domains. The information sought has been learned through reasoning as well as trial and error, while reporting structures, databases, visualization tools and doctrinal standards are typically standardized and well understood. However, as noted in the Pan-Domain Force Employment Concept, the CAF will increasingly find itself operating in the non-traditional domains of space, cyber and information. Within these non-traditional domains, the military staff have not yet developed extensive familiarity with the information required to support commanders. Moreover, it is increasingly obvious that joint operational military commanders may be called upon to support non-traditional defence activities across all domains. For example, the operational role of Canadian Joint Operations Command in Op LASER and Op VECTOR (the CAF’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its support for vaccine distribution, respectively) occurred across all the recognized domains. Those operations incorporated a number of assigned and implied tasks that required the chain of command to follow unique information requirements that are not normally encountered by military forces acting in traditional roles. To maintain information dominance over potential adversaries and rapidly adapt to non-traditional tasks, it is prudent to build a process to design COPs quickly and with a view to leveraging in-place information holdings and reporting structures.

The process of designing a COP can be broken down into three general phases. The first phase, Deducing Requirements, is partially captured in command support and intelligence doctrine within Canadian military doctrine. It involves defining the intelligence and operational problems faced by the commander, dividing them into information requirements and further breaking them down into actionable data points that can be assigned for collection. The second phase, Survey Reporting and Databases, involves employing specialists to capture required data from databases and generalist staff to mandate the required reports and returns to meet the friendly force information requirements (FFIR). The third and final phase, Visualization, involves visualizing information by employing traditional or non-traditional means. 

PHASE ONE: DEDUCING REQUIREMENTS

The planning of a COP starts with the identification of the problem facing the operational commander during operational design.^{Footnote 12}  Once the overall problem statement is defined, the commander and staff should be able to extract an intelligence problem by looking at factors external to the force and a generalized friendly force operational problem facing the commander. The friendly force operational problem statement should, to the maximum extent possible, capture the following aspects:

1. the internal tensions and dilemmas facing the force the commander intends to use to achieve the mission;
2. the commander’s authorities, responsibilities and accountabilities; and
3. the broad sum of the information the commander needs to make decisions within the frame of the friendly force.

The problem statement should generally take the form of a question, but it can be presented in the form of a statement if desired. As the commander’s operational design transforms into planning activities that refine courses of action (COA), the staff who are planning the COP should continue to evolve the operational problem until a COA and a finalized CONOPS are selected. At this point, the CONOPS should provide a firm context for the deductive work to come.

Once the friendly force operational problem is confirmed against the CONOPS, it is subdivided into FFIRs. Defined as consisting of “information the commander needs about friendly forces in order to develop plans and make effective decisions,” FFIRs form an essential component of the commander’s critical information requirements.^{Footnote 13}  If complete FFIRs are not available directly from the commander, they can be deduced from the friendly force operational problem. Each FFIR should take the form of a question addressing a subcomponent of the operational problem, using doctrinal terms whenever possible. Although it is theoretically possible to divide an operational problem into an infinite number of FFIRs for the purpose of manageability, the number should be limited to a maximum of ten. To test the validity of each FFIR, staff should make a broad attempt to link each to a commander’s decision point, decisive point or related condition. If the staff cannot do so, they should reconsider the requirement.^{Footnote 14}  Once the FFIRs are prioritized, staff should consider information requirements (IR) derived from each FFIR. The IRs are statements describing an assessment or known state of an organization or process that, in sum, answer the question posed by an FFIR. There is no limit to the number of IRs within an FFIR, but in order to keep the process manageable, the number of IRs should be kept to a minimum. 

Flowing from this, the final level of consideration is a data point or individual assessment. Although the information requested is not normally data, it consists of an individual fact or a simple standardized military qualitative or quantitative assessment that, once considered alongside others, can assist in answering the IR. In the case of standardized assessments, COP planners should consider how the required assessment is created and ensure that they note the methodology. In the case of qualitative assessments, the plan should explain how specific assessments are to be conducted and aggregated from one level of command to another. In the case of quantitative assessments, the mathematical logic should likewise be captured in the plan to establish a baseline understanding across staffs and possible automation.^{Footnote 15} 

Once the FFIRs, IRs and data points / assessments have been broken down, they should be plotted against a number of factors. As in the intelligence collection planning process, the factors should include sources and agencies that represent a commander’s superior, flanking and subordinate formations. When assessing these sources and agencies, staff should distinguish between an agency, which is typically a flanking, superior or supported formation, and a source such as a subordinate formation or unit. Additional factors that should be included are the expected reporting interval for the data point / assessment requested (including immediate, daily and weekly) and the form of reporting that will contain the data point / assessment in question. It should be noted that the interval and form of reporting may not align with the priorities assigned to the FFIRs and their subordinate information requirements. Rather, the interval of information should reflect the linkage of that data point / assessment to the decision or decisive point it would most likely support. This linkage should be made explicit in another column and indicate whether the data point / assessment is used to support a commander’s decision point or the attainment of a decisive point, or is used or can be used as a measure of performance/effectiveness. One last column can expand on the data point / assessment, its form and any additional information that may be relevant to its inclusion and eventual induction into the COP.^{Footnote 16}  At this point, the information collection plan is largely complete. As the operational plan continues to develop, FFIRs should be refined and reprioritized as necessary.

PHASE TWO: SURVEY REPORTING AND DATABASES

The second broad phase facing a planner is to engineer the reports, assessments and data automation that will underpin the COP. The first step within this phase should be to use the COP information collection plan to determine how it will nest within their superior headquarters and/or supported command. It may be the case that the higher formation will mandate the collection of information not relevant to the COP of the subordinate formation. If so, staff may add an FFIR specifically for the collection of that information and assign data points / assessments to subordinate formations for processing. In addition, staff should examine the information “asks” to superior or flanking commands. In some cases, the ask can be fulfilled with a product maintained by those commands, without the requirement for additional processing. At the operational level, these products would not necessarily consist of map overlays but of charts and forms of graphical assessments that could easily be rolled into the formation’s COP. To the greatest extent possible, planners should encourage the production of graphical assessments in the form of data objects and other structured formats that can be manipulated to meet information requirements.^{Footnote 17}  The end goal of this phase is to achieve a degree of economy of effort in the production of the COP and to draw advantages from the expertise of superior, flanking and supporting commands.

Once the context of the COP is understood from the perspectives of higher and flanking headquarters, planners should move on to the second step. The aim of this step is to understand what information does and does not flow into the headquarters. It also aims to capture the processes behind the subordinate commander’s assessments and determine what data/information can be drawn into the COP from shared databases. To this end, COP planners should survey any existing reports and returns systems from subordinate formations to determine what information requirements, data points and assessments are already provided. As the COP planners conduct their work, they should note, in particular, the structure of the available data. In order to fully leverage technology, simplify reporting systems and ease processing, structured data (predefined and formatted to a set structure) should be preferred to unstructured data (i.e. in its native format and not processed).^{Footnote 18}  In the case of assessments, staff should confirm the process behind assessments to ensure that there is a shared understanding of their meaning, using the appropriate level of military doctrine (e.g. American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Standardization Program; NATO; national) as a baseline. It is critical that planners survey the operational databases employed across the force and assess the reliability, integrity and security of the data held within those systems. Further consideration should be given to historical record keeping for accountability purposes, in case a need arises.^{Footnote 19}

If the current reporting system is adequate for the needs of the headquarters, and if the reports and returns are properly aligned with the required reporting intervals, the current system may be adequate and few changes may be required. This is the ideal outcome, as changes to reports and returns systems necessitate considerable staff efforts at all levels. However, most of the time, staff will discover information gaps between lower headquarters and their own. If this is the case, there are two options available to COP planners. The first is to alter current reports and returns to force the inclusion of the required information or assessments and/or alter the timings linked to the reporting cycle to recognize the assessed importance of a data point / assessment. This is usually the preferred option, as it leverages existing systems and habits and minimizes staff efforts. The second option is to completely redesign the reporting system to reflect the requirement of the new COP. Although this option may create some economies of effort in the longer term, it will likely require some shorter-term staff effort on the part of subordinate headquarters. It is, therefore, advisable to promulgate new reporting templates only during lower-tempo periods or when a change of campaign theme (and alteration of the operational problem) requires it.

Closely related to reporting are databases. Once planners have determined what databases are being used and how, they must seek to exploit them by automating their holdings into the COP. This process may be challenging given the rarity of the expertise required and the institutional restraints and constraints surrounding the procurement of services in the required fields, but it is a critical step. The draft Pan-Domain Force Employment Concept notes the intellectual challenges facing the military profession, while other documentation indicates that the CAF is grappling with retaining and recruiting qualified personnel.

It is, therefore, crucial to maximize the outputs of each member, including trained staff officers. Although the collection, analysis and production of a COP are important to decision making, each portion of the process that can be automated represents freed capacity that can be applied against the extraordinary information that emerges in a dynamic, multi-domain battle space.

If the planners determine that a database is secure and that the data in it are fit for purpose, efforts should be made to automate its use within a COP. If a database is determined to be inadequate, the database owner should be informed, and efforts must be made to improve it so as to achieve its full potential.

Lastly, at this stage, COP planners should bear in mind the classification level of the various data/assessments for the IR. Currently, the construction of COPs is limited to the highest level of classification permitted on the IT system hosting it. However, as multi-caveated IT systems become possible through innovations such as tailorable PKI encryption and data meta-tagging, it may become possible to weave together streams of data/assessments across different levels of classification and tailor the COP to the applicable audience. However, in the shorter term, planners will need to strike a balance between the size of the COP’s audience and the requirements of information security.^{Footnote 20}

PHASE THREE: VISUALIZATION

Once reporting, assessments and databases have been aligned with the information collection plan, staff can commence the third phase, visualization. It should be noted that within the context of this article, visualization does not equate to the cognitive state of battlefield visualization most often associated with the tactical level. Instead, this phase involves deciding on the form of the COP. On its own, a COP is merely an artifact, an object created by a human being. Only when this object is combined with the cognitive capacities of its users is its purpose is achieved: namely, a shared level of knowledge and understanding of the military operational situation. This renders the choice of form particularly important, since it will play a powerful role in aligning the understanding of the commander and the staff.^{Footnote 21}

Although many staff officers prefer to start with visualization and then work backwards, there are considerable risks in adopting that approach. One of the primary risks is that the visualization will supplant the operational problem, leading to a COP disconnected from the commander’s requirements. There are occasions when a COP can, and in some cases should, begin with the visualization. This is specifically the case in those domains at the tactical level where the adversary, environment, FFIRs and military doctrine are generally well understood. However, when operating within and across unfamiliar domains or when facing a unique operational problem, moving forward from first principles offers the advantage of getting it close to right the first time and creating a stronger degree of understanding of the commander’s needs within the headquarters.

Visualization is an incredibly complex issue, touching upon a number of disciplines. It is also a subject of intense debate, and numerous papers and studies have expressed dissatisfaction with many of the forms that COPs have taken over the years.^{Footnote 22}  To overcome those issues, it is accepted within its definition that a COP should be tailorable to the needs of individuals using it.^{Footnote 23}  Instead of displaying large amounts of fixed information, an ideal COP should allow commanders and staff to select and correlate information they consider relevant to an aspect of the operational problem and the commander’s CONOPS. This includes the ability to drill down where appropriate and to look across the ensemble of information in a headquarters to compare different types of information. Making the COP tailorable is related to an implied requirement of presenting data in a manner that enables the headquarters to synthesize information across the staff branches. Given the diversity of information within a command, this is by no means an easy feat.

Despite the complexity mentioned above, admiring the problem of visualization is not going to resolve it. The first step towards building a COP visualization is closely linked to the first step of the COP-building process and to the FFIRs. The staff officers leading the effort should carefully parse the FFIRs, attempting to identify commonalities between them. Typically, there will be some commonality which links some of them together. In the traditional tactical land, air and maritime domains, the FFIRs are linked by the requirement to understand the location of capabilities within time and space, with each of the traditional domains using a different scale relating to the characteristics of the tactical capabilities being used. Tactical practitioners within the air domain, for example, view time and space in scales very different from those used by land tactical officers. Since time and space are usually a commonality between most tactical-level FFIRs within the traditional domains, geomatics products figure prominently in traditional COP visualizations. When planners encounter exceptions, they usually design bespoke graphs, charts and other artifacts that communicate the information and assessments in question in a simplified way for the decision maker to incorporate into their understanding of the situation at hand.

Within the non-traditional domains of cyber, space and information, and in the face of some operational problems that may emerge across them, a geomatics baseline may not be the logical deduction. Although time and sequencing are often associated with FFIRs in direct or indirect ways, physical space may not be. Two examples of types of diagrams that may be more appropriate for baseline visualizations in some domains are network diagrams, which depict linkages and their relative weight of influence, and stylized diagrams, which show infrastructure and its dependencies. Planners should also note that in some instances, an audience may need to be educated on how to read them. Military officers and non-commissioned officers often forget that learning how to use maps and charts is not an automatic skill but one that needs to be taught, practised, and perfected over time. Military professionals must understand that a similar process within the new domains demands a degree of discipline and willingness to learn, and that unnecessarily switching visualizations may hamper effectiveness.

A second consideration facing COP planners in their choice of visualization is the ease of relating the domains to one another. Appealing to the commander’s coup d’œil is critical in shortening decision–action cycles. Since identifying opportunities across domains is key to striking the adversary from unanticipated directions, relating the three traditional environments to one another and the non-physical domains is essential to success.^{Footnote 24}  Ultimately, fighting (or the threat of fighting) in the traditional domains defines warfare and is the historical constant that will likely persist into the future.^{Footnote 25}  Therefore, a key challenge of any COP design will be to bridge the cognitive gap between what is known in the physical world and the less tangible and less certain elements of the non-physical domains. The author fully acknowledges the challenge inherent in this task.

CONCLUSION: THINKING AND PRACTICE MAKE BETTER

The process of creating COPs is often assumed to be simple. This could not be further from the truth. Trial and error have led the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force to develop best practices related to COPs that reflect the uniqueness of their domains. That noted, the operational dilemmas and characteristics in the non-traditional domains, and within headquarters where those domains intersect, require a more methodical approach to guide their efforts and, to the extent possible, get them right the first time. By understanding the operational dilemma, using deductive reasoning and rebuilding those deductions back up through automated and manual reporting systems towards a visualization baseline, staff can provide their commander with a powerful artifact enabling the coup d’œil required to keep our adversaries off balance.

Although this article attempts to lay out a roadway to an effective COP, military specialists in the new domains of cyber, space and information will likely need to develop military doctrine specific to their domains, and teach it to a whole generation of senior leaders, before they reach the “Eureka!” moment. Approaching the issue of COPs in a methodical and disciplined manner can likely improve performance in the shorter term and allow the CAF to push forward in its desire to achieve greater levels of pan-domain integration. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew J. Duncan, CD, is an intelligence officer and Commandant of the Canadian Forces School of Military Intelligence. He worked as the Joint Task Force LASER Liaison Officer to the Canadian Joint Operations Command, and later as an augmentee to planning efforts in support of Operation VECTOR.

Disclaimer

Adapted from “The Common Operational Picture: A Proposed Process for Joint Operational Practitioners,” originally published in the Royal Canadian Air Force Journal, Volume 11, Winter/Spring 2022. Adapted with permission.

This article first appeared in the April, 2024 edition of Canadian Army Journal (20-2).