If Philip of Macedon had transported himself from the fourth century B.C. to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, he would have recognized the basic tools at the disposal of U.S. Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf inside his command post: a map, a pointer and a voice to give orders. Over the last five years, and now at an accelerating pace, the U.S. Army and contractor General Dynamics C4 Systems of Arizona have been modernizing command posts into something Philip would scarcely recognize. The Command Post of the Future -- or CPOF (SEE'-poff), as the system's growing list of users call it -- consists of a Microsoft Windows workstation and three flat-screen monitors, optimized for corps- to battalion-level decision-making. It represents a confluence of computing technology, networking tools, visualization tools and database software pushed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
展开▼
