Valued Information at the Right Time (VIRT) and the Navy's Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) - A Win/Win Proposition

In this thesis I examine the theory of Valued Information at the Right Time (VIRT) and the benefits its implementation can provide to the Navy's best example of accurate information-sharing, the Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC). The primary premise of VIRT is that only information which has some value to the user and could impact mission accomplishment should be allowed to flow from a source to the user. If information has little or no value to the individual it is destined for, it must simply be regarded as overhead and should not be sent/received. Using a simple simulation I show in this thesis that VIRT has the potential to provide benefits of orders of magnitude versus a non-VIRT implementation. The Navy's CEC program represents a premier air track data sharing mechanism. It enables ships augmented with this capability and residing on the network to share fire control quality information on the individual parameters of air tracks such as location, course, speed, and altitude. There is a place for VIRT implementation within CEC. Such an implementation can prove beneficial both to CEC as an internal user of information and also as a supplier to external entities of its valuable track information. Finally, I provide a notional VIRT-enabled, product-line architecture for a coalition information-sharing system. If both the concept of VIRT and CEC are to have a place in the future of information-sharing, the issue of providing this information to our coalition partners must be addressed. The original document contains color images.