Some nights I like to get the kids to bed, pour a drink, and search the web for military-produced PDFs in order to look at the amazing graphics within them. I’d thought I was the only person with this hobby, but a few weeks ago my friend Finn Smith told me that he, too, likes military PDF graphics. The Internet is wonderful at bringing people together.

Finn and I soon agreed that “battlespace awareness” is a particularly good term to search. The best way to start such searches is to ask Google to only search PDFs within military domains. Like this:

What is “battlespace awareness?” Well, seen at a very, very high level, various parts of the U.S. military are trying to build an operating system for use in wartime situations. This effort has presented all sorts of challenges and funding opportunities. What should the interface look like? How should the enemy be identified on a screen? What role should drones play? And so forth. And as a side-effect of all this thinking people occasionally create diagrams that explain their ideas and justify their budgets. Here’s an example, from “Joint Synthetic Battlespace: Cornerstone for Predictive Battlespace Awareness,” by Phister, Bush, and Plonisch.