Analysis of Marine Corps Efforts in the Pursuit of the Joint Blue Force Situational Awareness Capability

Abstract

The purpose of the thesis is to analyze Marine Corps efforts to comply with the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) directive for a single Joint Blue Force Situational Awareness (JBFSA) capability. The shared battlespace is saturated with stovepipe digital situational awareness and command and control systems. To ensure interoperability between ground forces, JROC Memorandum 163-04 (JROC, 2004) approved the Marine Corps and Army convergence strategy to adapt a single JBFSA capability. An incremental approach strategy was adopted to reach SA convergence. Joint Capabilities Release (JCR) represents Increment I and is currently being fielded to operational units within the Army. Joint efforts are ongoing to develop and test Increment II, Joint Battle Command-Platform (JBC-P). Both software packages leverage fielded Blue Force Tracker hardware and provide enhanced capabilities to address JROC convergence directives. JCR and JBC-P were designed to coincide within the Army Battle Command System. As a result, both solutions are more Army centric than Marine Corps centric. Consequently, mismatches exist within and beyond the software between the Services. The primary challenge for the Marine Corps team is marrying the solutions with the Marine Air-Ground Task Force systems and architecture.