What the Navy Wants from Big Data

The Navy’s ISR cycle (consisting of tasking, collection, processing, exploitation, and dissemination [TCPED]) is not undertaken for its own sake but with a clear, vital objective: providing the fleet with situational awareness. In military operations, knowledge is power. In the Navy, it is situational awareness—derived, in part, from ISR data—that gives commanders that power by helping them answer four critical questions: Where am I? Where are my friends? Where is the enemy? Where is everyone else? As the rest of this chapter demonstrates, an inability to answer any of these four questions can be disastrous. In January 2013,