To optimize overall situational understanding (SU) in the battlefield, the US Army, Air Force, Navy and SOF are seeking new programs. These programs will adopt a variety of compute and bandwidth-intensive technologies, such as cloud-based networks.

Whether centralized or at the edge, one of the biggest military needs extant today is the imperative for a common operating picture (COP) with support for Pattern of Life (POL) analysis across all relevant data sets, to enable powerful capabilities such as anomaly detection, entity tracking, real-time alerting, predictive classification and historical analysis.

As rivalry returns at sea, navies are seeking dominance at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. In this context, using networked datalinks to enable, integrate, and enhance communications is a strategic, operational, and tactical priority for navies.

In order to achieve and maintain warfighting overmatch, coordinate deployed forces and enable new capabilities, the US Army, Air Force, and Navy are actively looking to new programs such as Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) to ensure warfighters have maximum situational awareness.

Backed by broad support from government and industry, the release of SOSA Technical Standard 1.0 promises a new era of open standards-based system integration with flexibility and interoperability as its hallmarks.

Some environmental constraints for deployed military computing systems are operational temperature, humidity, sand, dust, vibration, shock/basic, leakage (immersion), steam and water jet cleaning, rapid decompression, contamination by fluids (e.g. oil, fuel, cleaning), nuclear hardness, and input voltage.

What are the benefits of using a modular open systems approach to upgrade legacy military electronics systems?

Awards are in three tiers -- ranging from platinum, the highest, to the gold awards, and finally to the silver awards.