The ability to collect, process and disseminate the flow of information leading to increased mission space awareness and subsequent dominance constitutes the essence of presentday air operations, firmly fixed in a classical extended command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance framework

Operation Enduring Freedom: Under a clear moonless night sky, flying over the mountainous Afghan terrain in a remote location, the droning Hercules AC-130 of the US Air Force quickly dropped from 2,000 ft to 80 ft above the valley floor— its under-fuselage camera having locked on the assigned target whose coordinates had been received from an unmanned Global Hawk, loitering above at stratospheric altitudes. The silence of the sleepy night was suddenly shattered with the gunship spewing out its lethal arsenal of 105mm high-explosive rounds, vapourising the fleeting Taliban target below. But could the Angel of Death—a sobriquet earned by the howitzer gunship because of the shape that its anti-missile flares take when they are fired—destroy its target in the very first pass under dark-night flight conditions and over a difficult terrain without a highly elaborate C4ISR system in place? The Hercules attack was an ideal example of C4ISR supported operation carried out in a perfect network-centric warfare environment.

But what exactly is C4ISR; how has it evolved and what part does it play in today’s warfare, especially air operations?

The Evolution of C4ISR

In the history of organised armed conflict—even before the days of Hannibal, Alexander the Great or Chengiz Khan—vesting command and control (C2) of assigned forces with a designated commander for achievement of a specific mission has been a fundamental feature of warfare. More and more components have been added in an evolutionary manner to this basic feature to assist the commander(s) in achieving the assigned missions/objectives. In executing ‘command and control’ functions in today’s environment, the commander relies on information or intelligence from a variety of sources. First, timeliness and quality of intelligence being crucial to the commander’s quality of decisions, the ‘I’ (intelligence) gets closely tied with the C2 functions. Next, communications being the conduit through which information or intelligence is exchanged, the co-efficient of their effectiveness gets directly linked to the C2I function, which expands the equation to C3I. The vast amount of data generated on a modern battlefield can neither be collated, analysed, synthesised (to generate actionable intelligence) nor can it be disseminated, without adequate data processing support being integrated in all component parts of the system. Computers have become ubiquitous enough for another C to merit an equal status in the C3I paradigm. The resulting C4I has therefore come to represent an integrated architecture in which the quality and effectiveness of a commander’s executive ‘command and control’ function gets directly linked with the comprehensiveness and quality of intelligence obtained and disseminated through a variety of communication channels, and how each aspect is supported and enhanced by automation provided by computers. The sum total of support element in the C4I build is thus to sift, sort, integrate and present all relevant information in an easily digestible format in real time so as to enable decision-makers at all levels to be completely ‘aware’ of the ‘situation’. But does it stop here?

Armed forces from different countries have added letters to this basic acronym i.e., ‘C4I’ to create an alphabet ‘amalgam’ corresponding to their understanding of grouping of military functions which assist the command and control process. The British added a STAR to C4I, to indicate inclusion of surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance as significant components. The US military has evolved ‘C4ISR’ to bring surveillance and reconnaissance under the same canvas.

C4ISR in Air Operations

The ability to collect, process and disseminate the flow of information leading to increased mission space awareness and subsequent dominance constitutes the essence of present-day air operations, firmly fixed in a classical extended command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) framework. As stated earlier, the latest buzzword is to also include ‘target acquisition’ to complete the sensor-shooter loop. Success of such operations is ensured through shared situational awareness, close collaboration, coordination of capabilities and the ability to react quickly to highly dynamic modern airborne threats.

As technology continued to evolve in terms of better sensors and computing power, technologically advanced air forces the world over redefined the roles, functions and responsibilities of the then existing conventional AD organisation and its intervening command echelons to encompass all air operations and not remain confined to AD functions alone. It was but a natural evolution. For effective AD, air space management is a precondition and for that a total knowledge of spatial orientation of all friendly air vehicles (fighters, transport aircraft, surveillance platforms, armed helicopters, UAVs and so on) in the given air space mandatory. With such data being available, conduct of all air operations such as mission planning of own aircraft, storage and dissemination of target data, issue of air tasking orders to bases, control of support elements (tankers, UAVs, AWACS), tactical routing to avoid space and time conflict, search and rescue operations and so on from a single control centre made logical sense. The AD Control Centres thus evolved into Air Operations Control Centres, while the intermediate node, normally called the AD Direction Centre (ADDC) in the earlier structure, was either replaced by a Control and Reporting Centre (CRC) or eliminated altogether, depending upon the geographical factors and traffic density.