Intelligent agents as one framework for defining fusion requirements for complex adaptive systems

The international defense and security community is moving ahead at flank speed to realize the vision of network centric warfare (NCW; aka network-enabled capability (NEC) and etc). Extensive efforts are being put forth to define, design, and develop many of the technical components of such a capability, to include varieties of networked communications systems, various highly-capable military platforms, and "service-oriented architectures" for a broad-based enterprise service middleware capability. To varying degrees, the human factors/human engineering community has also engaged in broad studies of "sensemaking" and "shared awareness" toward understanding some of the information-sharing and information- understanding paradigms put forward in the NCW literature.