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The U.S. Navy is on the verge of deploying the first parts of an intelligence collection and management network designed to share data between fleet task forces and command and analysis centers. The completed system will provide intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting support to government agencies, U.S. allies and all of the services.

The U.S. Army is marshalling the forces of supercomputers and superanalysts in an effort to merge diverse battlefield intelligence data into knowledge for commanders. The intention is to establish a technology-based means of fusing vast amounts of sensor data into effective information without magnifying the inescapable errors that creep into data at various stages.

The two military commands primarily responsible for homeland defense are coordinating their efforts on the new front lines of cyberspace. Because both offensive and defensive information operations are an integral part of protecting North America, the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command are training their experts in combined environments to ensure that they can act swiftly when responding to threats or planning strategies.

The People's Republic of China is building the necessary infrastructure to mine the ports of Taiwan should military conflict break out between the two governments. This capability would give China an effective blockade ability without the risk of escalation that would emerge from a direct military confrontation with the United States.

Defeating terrorism will require close coalition coordination, especially for information garnered in the network-centric battlespace. Being able to provide accurate intelligence rapidly to the right coalition forces may prove to be a key element in winning the war on terror.

This is an interesting question, and if I truly knew the answer, I would be very rich and powerful. However, I am not any better at predicting the future than anyone else. Yet I find this to be a useful intellectual exercise as the alternative leaves us substituting hope for strategy, chaos management for a campaign plan and damage control for daily activity.

The network-centric Free World is placing a greater emphasis on intelligence than ever before-both for battlespace military operations and for winning the war on terrorism. However, while much attention has been focused on intelligence collection, processing and dissemination, it is knowledge management that will win or lose conflicts in the future.

Force transformation and ongoing military operations are both complementing and competing for new information technology system development. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are validating many concepts and technologies, but requirements emerging from those fronts threaten to derail intricate long-term plans for modernizing the force across network-centric lines.

A broad-based initiative underway in the U.S. Defense Department aims to ensure that all of the data amassed and processed in the future battlespace truly can become useful knowledge to all U.S. forces. This effort is trying to make all data sources, correlators and user interfaces resident on the defense network so that a user could select those best suited for his or her requirements.

The restructuring of U.S. troops into small, agile fighting forces and the multinational, multicultural nature of today's decision making military teams are adding entirely new dimensions to knowledge management and collaboration in the military. Command and control decision makers must discard the strategies that worked for large forces prepared to fight on a designated front line and explore new tactics. Concurrently, they find themselves working in a collaborative environment rife with language barriers, experiential differences and hidden agendas. Technology can help break through some of these barriers, so researchers are examining team decision-making dynamics so they can determine which knowledge management tools are likely to be most effective.