Realizing Operational Planning and Assessment in the Twenty-First-Century Air Operations Center: How a Refined Planning Construct and Semantic Technologies Can Enable Delivery of the AOC’s Last Unsupported Functions (Part 2)*

semantic models of both operational plans and operational environments to realign and relate data as well as enable automated reasoning and inferencing across those models. With the CAPE-based solutions in play, cross-domain commanders and staffs, as well as interagency, coalition, and nongovernmental organizations, will be able to communicate operational meaning and intent in a more structured, well-understood way. Further, those solutions will open the door for technology to truly assist (through semantic reasoning) in operational design, plan development, execution, and assessment. Given the appropriate tool support, an OPM can—in real time or as required by the user—interact with any or all available operational environment data or OEMs. For the first time, this would permit both interactive, real-time feedback during course-of-action and detailed plan development and high-fidelity strategic, operational, and higher-tactical war gaming. During operations, this approach would enable the realization of “living” plans through the constant interaction of the “living” OPM of the ever-morphing operational plan with streaming and changing outputs from the “living” OEM—constantly updated with data from both open-source and intelligence reports, execution data from live operations, and outputs of tactical-, operational-, and strategic-assessment processes. The author believes that, just as there are few technological impediments to rapidly realizing this approach across all of the Air Force’s AOCs and, indeed, the wider joint planning community, so should there be few impediments associated with interservice “operational culture.” This is true primarily because the underpinning CAPE construct is a “best of breed” evolution of existing joint operational design and planning constructs, now having the innovative benefit of ontological definitions of, and syntax for, all elements of the construct—something sadly missing currently. Second, the use of a service-orientedarchitecture-based implementation makes the solution set readily available to any and all domains yet gives each one the continued use