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COLLABORATIVE TARGETING
OFFBOARD ONBOARD
E
merging long-range, high-speed threats are placing a premium on networking to enable disparate sensors and weapons to detect, track and engage. In the ongoing global defence buzzword bingo tournament, few phrases score better than ‘collaborative targeting’. Augmenting endless industry and program PowerPoint presentations, this missive is usually flanked by pictograms where outsized platforms stalk the airspace, coastline and territory of an
unidentifiable nation linked together with brightly-coloured arrows. But search for a workable definition of the phrase and one is disappointed. Even the bible of military phraseology – the US Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military Terms – contains no definition. Instead, one is driven to compose one’s own interpretation, which for the purpose of this article, will define collaborative targeting as the use of offboard and onboard sensors, communications systems, kinetic or electronic effectors to engage targets originating from over-the-horizon ranges.
