Battlefields are chaotic environments. The commander's difficulty in finding out what is happening, interpreting it correctly, and coordinating with other commanders is traditionally called the "fog of war." The commander who has the whole picture can coordinate with others to take the right measures, and can communicate orders quickly and decisively has an enormous advantage over those who have to accept the fog of war. The need for visualizing the whole battlefield (space, air, sea, and ground) and sharing that vision was demonstrated during Allied military operations in DESERT STORM. This need has been addressed by several studies based on actions in the desert. Joint service and coalition-based operations depend heavily on sharing the battlefield vision.
Previously, service and country specific symbology messaging limitations were major obstacles to creating a common operational picture of the battlefield and communicating this picture to the warfighter. Changes to graphic information were made via text messages, such as Imagery Interpretation Reports (IIRs) or Tactical ELINT (TACELINT) messages. In the past, when these messages were received, users had to manually incorporate changes in graphic form on their workstations. The necessity to reenter the change retards information dissemination, which is critical in times of crisis when speed is most crucial. In some cases, commands revert to grease pencil changes on manual displays to reconstruct common situation displays. The Graphical Situation Display, or GSD, is a valuable step toward solving these problems and providing U.S. commanders with these capabilities.
GSD provides important capabilities for the commander, including displaying the common operational picture of the battlefield and communicating that picture with other warfighter systems. In order to display the common operational picture GSD implements the MIL-STD-2525 Common Warfighting Symbology standard (battlefield and tactical geometry) and the Geospatial Symbols for Digital Display (GeoSym™) performance specification (mapping, charting, and geodesy symbology). GSD also provides the ability to communicate the common picture by implementing the USMTF GraphRep-Overlay message, which has been designed expressly for the purpose of transmitting MIL-STD-2525 data. In order to provide this capability to the warfighter, GSD is implemented as a set of software libraries that can be integrated with existing or future applications. It can be used in a wide range of configurations, allowing agencies and organizations at all echelons to use many disciplines to update and disseminate tactical graphic information rapidly to a broad user community. It allows its user networks to follow their doctrine and chain of command, and to interface between producers and consumers of information.
GSD allows data changes without reentry by supplying information that can be easily modified and redisplayed graphically on the host workstations. GSD broadens the utility of graphics by allowing updates for display-only terminals, such as may be found in warfighting equipment. Furthermore, with GSD capabilities, the effort of re-entering data and the need to revert to grease pencils are eliminated. For incoming information, GSD has the capability to parse the incoming message and display the data graphically. When information needs to be disseminated, GSD has the capability to generate a message using the same information.
Because GSD is a library of software it depends on an integrating application for the following service functions:
Integrating the GSD libraries with an application provides these capabilities to the application user:
Specific library functions may be individually selected from the GSD Toolkit. The GSD software libraries are customizable for existing systems.
GSD is implemented in ANSI C and Java, and runs on a variety of Unix platforms as well as Windows NT. In addition to providing standard symbology, GSD provides the capability for users to generate custom symbols used locally for locally significant activity or entities. GSD has been used extensively in a number of exercises as well as operationally. GSD has been integrated into a number of major systems, both military and commercial.
GSD is Government-Off-The-Shelf (GOTS) software. Previous versions of GSD (those that implemented MIL-STD-2525A) were available as DII COE segments; however, current versions (those that implement MIL-STD-2525B and later) are not available as DII COE segments.
To request more information on GSD, please refer to the Contact GSD page.
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The GSD tri-fold provides a brief description of the GSD software and examples of displays created using GSD. For more detailed information, please see the GSD brochure.
Tri-fold - Front
Tri-fold - Back
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The GSD brochure provides detailed information on GSD and examples of displays created using GSD.
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This is a screen capture of a tactical overlay produced by the GSD demonstration application software. The overlay is a recreation of an overlay created by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, with some additional (simulated) IMINT and SIGINT graphical reports displayed along with the tactical operations overlay. The graphic was created by GSD rendering MIL-STD-2525 symbology on an Arc Digitized Raster Graphic (ADRG) map background that is being displayed by the Army Research Laboratory's Combat Information Processor application, which is built using the JMV (JMTK Visualization component) Chart map application.
To communicate the graphical information shown in the image above you can transmit the GIF itself (a 251 KB image) or you can transmit the corresponding GraphRep-Overlay message (a 23KB ASCII file). The GraphRep-Overlay message contains all the information necessary for reconstructing the tactical overlay and intelligence information shown in the screen capture, but in a format that is one-tenth the size of the image.
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This six-minute automated presentation will provide you with the basic history, design, and operational capabilities of the GSD software. It is currently only available as a 6MB Windows Media Video (.wmv) file. If you have trouble viewing this file, please contact the GSD Help Desk for assistance.
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