Situation and Threat Refinement Approach for Combating the Asymmetric Threat

In order to combat the present and future asymmetric threats to national and international security, information fusion developments must progress beyond current Level 1 (Object Refinement) paradigms. By focusing on the challenges of Continuous Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace (CIPB), Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) has begun to elicit an infrastructure and enabling technologies for information fusion at Level 2 (Situation Refinement) and Level 3 (Threat Refinement). Our approach to Level 2 is to perform spatial and temporal processing on tracks produced by Level 1 multi-sensor, multi-target fusion supplemented with intelligence information from both structured data sources such as databases, and from unstructured data sources such as text documents. The output of Level 2 is referred to as a factlet. Factlet creation is driven both by the evolution of events in the battlespace and by the top-down information needs of the CIPB analysts working at Level 3. Our approach to Level 3 is to drive existing and newly formulated models of threat behavior, viewed from multiple perspectives, such as political, economic, and tactical, with factlets derived in Level 2, to support the determination of possible enemy courses of action. We leverage existing algorithmic lessons learned from Level 1 Classification Fusion, where each sensor represented track classification from a different, complementary perspective, for factlet or evidence fusion. In addition, an approach to automated threat information discovery is discussed, which is initiated by the need for supporting evidence to further refine the Level 3 inferencing processes. Our approach to Level 2 Situation Refinement and Level 3 Threat Refinement will be demonstrated via an Air Force CIPB scenario.