Modern Counter-Insurgency (COIN) and Irregular Warfare (IW) are increasingly complex. Contributing to this complexity is the need to develop and maintain a mental map of relevant environmental and historical factors and their interactions, generated from disparate sources of information that must be organized, processed and integrated. Compounding this challenge is the fact that mental pictures cannot easily be passed from one soldier to the next. This is a problem when the tactical situation dictates frequent changes in unit Areas of Operations (AOs), and particularly in cases where units rotate on a regular basis. When units hand over an AO, the incoming unit has to quickly rebuild a mental picture or "story" of their operating environment and much organizational knowledge is lost.

This paper discusses the type of information and a prototype system architecture that enables a vehicle crew commander to view, organize and to spatially input this complex operating picture, through placement of 3d interactive symbols directly into the real-life on-site scene from the vehicle perspective. A panoramic camera and dashboard monitor give the commander a surround view, a 360 degree laser range finder supplies the range information for accurate annotation geo-location. This is intended to allow greater performance by combat units in a COIN situation, through increasing situational understanding of the complex environment.