What follows is illustrative rather than exhaustive of how technology can be used in a broad system approach. Many of these technologies currently are being addressed within the defense community. Analysts, military strategists, acquisition planners, and even "futurists" are wrestling with the meaning and consequences of the Information Age. Our focus on systems and technologies begins with these four characteristics.

Knowledge of Self, Adversary, and Environment

In the modern threat environment, it is difficult to estimate where the next crisis may occur, let alone the next war. Even 5 years ago, who would have foreseen the significant involvement of the U.S. military in places like Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and the South China Sea? To which hot spots can we expect to see U.S. troops deployed over the next 5 years? Over the next 20? In this section we argue that, in addition to improving our force capabilities, the U.S. must develop an intelligence repository far more extensive than during the Cold War, covering virtually all the important regions and organizational structures throughout the world.

During the Cold War, intelligence agencies focused more on a bipolar world and built sizable organizations to collect information on "the other side." This same intelligence structure, in the main, is in place today facing a multipolar world, where any number of power structures-whether they be states, international organizations, or even small groups of individuals-must be monitored with an understanding that extends to their leadership, culture, economic direction, and military capability.

As the technologies relevant to knowing the adversary and his environment are examined, an emerging theme is the clear shift from technology developments that once resided within our government to those driven by commercial demands. For example, the information technologies used by U.S. intelligence agencies are of such complexity, importance, and expense that they are referred to as "national assets" and are developed and managed by large, dedicated organizations. Even here, commercial companies are rapidly encroaching on what once seemed to be an unassailable market position in Earth observation systems. One may already purchase synthetic aperture radar interferometry images from any number of sources, and panchromatic visual images with one meter resolution will soon be available over the counter for remarkably little cost. Indeed, the only real barrier to this burgeoning market is the understandable concerns that governments have with allowing such technology to be widely available. In areas such as encryption and data security, commercial developers are more likely to reach limits of government acceptance before those of technological capability.

With untold billions invested in communications systems, even the most modern U.S. military communication systems often compare poorly with commercial systems. While this has long been the case for fielded systems, it is becoming true for even the most sophisticated research and development programs being undertaken by defense organizations.

As a case in point, one may consider a program recently initiated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) called Battlefield Awareness and Data Dissemination (BADD). At the heart of this program, large amounts of data are collected within a vast database residing on commercial computers and enterprise management systems. This information is then disseminated to the troops through the commercial Global Broadcast System (GBS) onto "set-top" boxes, an enabling technology that was developed commercially. Even with this leveraging of private industry, there is a real question as to whether DARPA will be able to field a system that would compete well with surprisingly similar commercial systems. Internet channels planned by media industry giants such as BSkyB will offer multi-megabit, interactive, digital data connections to the Net merely as an enticement for subscribers to enroll for their full digital broadcasting service (200 to 300 channels of digital video and sound). Understanding that there is much more to BADD than the little discussed here, one still almost wonders whether DARPA could simply buy a subscription and connect it to an appropriate, commercial, network management system. More to the point, if even well funded and aggressive technology development organizations such as DARPA find it difficult to remain ahead of commercial advancements, there may be a fundamental lesson to be learned regarding the management of defense-related technologies.

Knowledge and Intelligence

"Intelligence" is comprised of five categories of knowledge and understanding: a society's leadership; culture and values; the strategic, political, economic, and physical environment; military capabilities and orders of battle; and comprehensive battlefield information. Examples of technologies and system approaches of potential relevance in these areas are discussed below.