The idea of developing a platform to collect and share operational knowledge laterally wasn’t well received by those Michaelis ran it by, with one exception. Col. Paul E. Funk, brigade commander with the 1st Cavalry Division, and a former commander of Michaelis, thought it had merit. He put it in front of Maj. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli (then-commander of the 1st Cavalry Division), and Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz (former III Corps commander).
With the support of these senior officers, a platform called CAVNET was created and fielded in Iraq in 2004. Michaelis went with it as battle command and chief knowledge officer with 1st Cavalry. The CAVNET website resided on SIPRNet (the U.S. military’s secure internet), cataloging the latest after-action reports and intelligence from units in Iraq.
“When a new unit would rotate in, the local command would say, ‘Here’s a hard drive with all the information we’ve collected about people who live in this area and its particulars,’ Maeda said. “It was woefully inadequate.”
The information was available to a swath of personnel broader than the typical intel officers at division or brigade level. Captains and lieutenants in companies and platoons could use CAVNET to prepare and plan for their next patrol. By 2004, Iraq had become a small-unit war and CAVNET gave those units the power of aggregated operational knowledge.
A screenshot of the Tactical Ground Reporting System (TIGR), a virtual notebook developed by DARPA that could be used by soldiers in the field to share tactical information. General Dynamics Mission Systems image
Today, Michaelis is executive officer to the under secretary of the Army. He emphasizes that the idea behind CAVNET was central to the fight in Iraq. “We knew that sharing ground-level information and data was more important than [focusing on] top-down information.”
Bringing TIGR to Life
Even before CAVNET made it into the field, DARPA was developing another command-and-control platform called Command Post of the Future (CPOF), a networked information visualization system that facilitated communication between dispersed commanders. CPOF was part of an ambitious broader vision within DARPA to leverage and share data from a suite of sensors worn by a soldier. Beginning in the early 2000s, CPOF saw extensive use in wartime in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it was continuously updated in the field in response to many users’ inputs. CPOF became an official program of record for the Army in 2006. As successful as CPOF was, Mari Maeda, Ph.D., a Program Manager in DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office at the time, thought a simpler knowledge-sharing solution that could be fielded even more quickly could be even more relevant.
After speaking with a variety of captains, lieutenants, and sergeants returning from Iraq, she realized that they still shared mission information via notebooks, digital cameras, and laptops with Microsoft Office. Operations information was saved locally and sent to headquarters.
“When a new unit would rotate in, the local command would say, ‘Here’s a hard drive with all the information we’ve collected about people who live in this area and its particulars,’ Maeda said. “It was woefully inadequate.”