Advanced collaborative technologies supporting the 21st century warfighter in a network centric environment

The shift from industrial age technology to information age technology has thrust the 21^st century warfighter into some of the toughest challenges faced thus far to protect this country. The solutions to these challenges are forcing the warfighter to assimilate and process vast amounts of information from a broad spectrum of domains. The global information grid (GIG) provides the global connectivity for the information to get to where it´s needed, however the information need to be processed and converted to knowledge to empower the warfighter to succeed. Bringing this information together in a comprehensible fashion has driven the military to a new approach to warfare, a network-centric warfare (NCW) approach - also called network-centric operations & warfare (NCOW) by the air force community. This paper discusses recent collaboration technology research that is prototyping an advanced decision support environment (ADSE) that enable the warfighter to effectively use the vast amount of information that is available through the GIG to implement the NCOW approach for achieving successful military operations throughout the 21^st century