SIGMA—An interactive message service for the Military Message Experiment

Abstract

The increasing sophistication of military systems and decreasing time frame for making decisions make it essential to provide the military commander better quality information faster. With today's technology, messages can traverse several thousand miles in fractions of a second, but hours are lost at either end, both in entering the message into the communications system and in delivering it to the person who can act on it. Even after the message is delivered, an officer acting on it requires background information to formulate a proper response. More often than not, that information is available only after time-consuming searching through ponderous files. The response is usually an outgoing message which must be coordinated with other people, many of whom are not in the immediate vicinity of the message drafter. Hand-carrying the draft to these people slows the response still further. In times of crisis this system can easily become overloaded, throwing the entire operation into disarray.