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Overview

Surveillance:

Situational understanding is the accurate interpretation of a situation and the likely actions of groups and individuals within it. This includes adversaries, neutral parties, assumed friendly entities and non-combatants. Awareness, analysis, knowledge, comprehension and judgement facilitate understanding, which enables timely and accurate decision-making. Situational understanding is an essential prerequisite for the conduct of campaigns and operation.

Air power plays a key role in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), offering real-time battlespace awareness.
ISR is an activity that synchronises and integrates direction, planning and collection capabilities and actions with processing, exploitation and dissemination systems.

Many assets in the battlespace have a surveillance capability. Surveillance operations are a key activity that is crucial to underpin a commander’s understanding of the force disposition and current activities of an adversary or potential adversary. 
 

Key Terms

Surveillance

The systematic observation of the air, maritime, land, space or cyberspace domains by visual, aural, electronic, photographic or other means.