ARCHITECTURAL ENVIRONMENTS
Our recently developed Conceptual CAOC and Command Center environments incorporate unique, proprietary technologies combined in new and innovative ways. ATR’s architectural design represents an Intellectual Major Discriminator having application to not just the Department of the Air Force in C4ISR, but also the Department of Defense as a whole. Our Architectural Environments (AE) and our unique philosophical approach have taken a combination of spatial fusion, site lines, and other technologies proprietary to ATR and organically combined them into a proposed new powerful direction for the design and implementation of Command & Control.
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN & ENGINEERING
One of the beginning keystones of ATR’s way of thinking is the industrial design around the Decision Support Module or DSM. The DSM concept has been shown confidentially and has been received with enthusiasm at the very highest levels of the Air Force, including the Secretary, Chief of Staff, and the Commander level of the Air Force’s Space Command. At a briefing on March 2, 2004, the Secretary of the Air Force indicated that he would support funding of developmental prototyping of the DSM in an arrangement in which ATR will team with the Advanced Physics Labs at Johns Hopkins University – a University-Affiliated Research Center ( UARC ) of the Federal Government.
According to one aspect of ATR’s proprietary technology, the DSM combines innovative site lines and event horizons in a brand new way to organize and display information. This enables the warfighter to be in both a protected individual mini-environment and also be in an open, collaborative Command Center environment – all at the same time. The design philosophy incorporated in the DSM allows for protected yet collaborative C4ISR – something that both military and governmental Command & Control has unsuccessfully struggled with for years. The screen design of the DSM also allows for an infinitely flexible platform as to how and where mission(s) data and information are displayed and graphically fused.
SOFTWARE COGNITIVE GRAPHIC VISUALIZATIONS & DESIGN
As a result of our intense and innovative thinking concerning Architectural Environments and industrial design DSM, ATR also started looking and thinking about the software graphics that were being displayed to the warfighter – “Photons on Eyeballs” as the warfighter integration people in the Air Staff at the Pentagon put it.
This led to consideration of the whole graphic approach. It goes without saying that the Department of the Air Force is very good at generating Literal Graphics. ATR focused on a whole new philosophical approach to the displaying of information that we refer to as Cognitive Graphics.
What are Cognitive Graphics? They are a whole series of ways to present fused Literal Graphics within a new visual framework, whereby what is displayed and perceived by the warfighter represents a combination of a potentially large numbers of information stovepipes that are precombined behind-the-scenes and then presented as a total Cognitive Graphic. These can be used as unfolding real-time warfighter tools, as planning tools for real-time war-gaming, and as recent histories of the campaign. With this tool, it is possible to see time right now, look into the future as a plan (i.e. an Air Tasking Order or ATO), and look backwards in time. We refer to this innovative approach as a graphical data-hallway. It is a concept that resonated with the Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff, and they consequently strongly support its further development and growth.
ATR has developed a whole series of these proprietary concepts, which we refer to as “cognitions.” While they have yet to be fully animated for presentation, these additional proprietary constructs are capable of being developed into powerful software that would be bought and used by the Command & Control community of the U.S. military and associated governmental agencies in the same business.
ATR’s APPROACH…A NEW WAY OF ASKING “WHY?” “HOW?” & “WHY NOT?”
We at ATR believe that our organization, as a Intellectual Major Discriminator of design for Command & Control, is not just based upon our individual concepts and products that have been briefly described above, but more by our overriding philosophy of thinking outside the box – whereby we throw away all preconceptions and prejudices and instead use our internal proprietary methodology of design towards attributes. This immediately allows us to meta-form the design construct to a new and innovative place.
Our exposure and ongoing developing contacts within senior leadership of the Department of the Air Force, major commands, and the C4ISR community also represent a tremendous value to the market. We have been entrusted by both Sec. Roche and Chief-of-Staff Gen. Jumper to approach this differently. We believe they feel that our unique approach to thinking about the design of C4ISR is unique and refreshing – a decisive forward step from aerospace industry standard. They charged us with the mission to stay on our own unique course…We have promised them that we won’t be swayed by industry but will keep thinking outside the box. We mean to keep that promise to those two men.
CONCLUSIONS
The Mission Statement of ATR is to envision the future of Command & Control as it relates to design, engineering, and implementation of facilities for future generations of Warfighters.
The above-framed Mission Statement synopsizes ATR’s intentions. We are not new to Command & Control design. Our over a decade-long history includes professional involvement with AeroJet, Northrop-Grumman Electronic Systems, and Lockheed-Martin in C4ISR design.
Our recent exposure of our proprietary thinking has placed us in the trusted position of taking a major leadership role in effecting the envisioning of Command & Control design for our nation’s future.
We mean to do just that – we have been tasked to do so.
