Traditionally, information provided to warfighters only gave them broad situational awareness. Today, information from sensors and databases can help warfighters target past what they can see. This has prompted the Department of Defense (DoD) to build a military analog to the Internet, to be a font of warfighting information (and system services). But how should responsibility for providing information and services be shared between global external sources and organic local sources? Both will be necessary, and sensor characteristics matter. But sometimes the need for integrated battlespace pictures (e.g., the Recognized Air Picture) pushes responsibility higher. Thus, tools are needed to let commanders use whatever information from whatever sources fits their needs at a given time. A strong bias toward interoperability would foster universal access to information. Liberal distribution of unit-level sensors and connectivity should help warfighters develop and share operational information. And better technology is needed to marry local and global information sources more easily. Finally, some entity within DoD should review current information services and lay out a road map for filling in the blanks.

Traditionally, information was used to provide commanders with broad situational awareness, leaving operators to rely on what their own senses provided (quintessential local data) in order to conduct combat. In the last 50 years, the advent of sensors and their ever-lengthening range, coupled with the ability to digitize information and distribute it globally, have changed all this. The campaign in Kosovo was largely fought using global information: Sensor-acquired data on Yugoslavian targets were often analyzed far from the front and converted into aim points for precision-guided weaponry. The rise of global information in turn suggests that DoD's information systems as a whole should be agglomerated into what has been variously referred to as a "System of Systems" (from Admiral Owens); "Battlespace Infosphere" (from the Air Force Science Advisory Board); or, the term now favored within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the "Global Information Grid (GIG)" (or, in the shorthand used here, the Grid).