Advanced Command and Control Facilities For Distributed Decision-Making

The widening spectrum of conflict and the need for military forces to participate in peace, humanitarian, and other types of operation have created the need for new types of decisionsupport facilities. This new reality has provided significant challenges to the technical support community. To meet these challenges, Sweden has produced the Aquarium facility at the National Defence College in Stockholm. The Aquarium is the Swedish National Command and Control Research and Development test bed. The test bed provides an environment for developing and studying new concepts and approaches that will permit the Swedish Armed Forces to meet the challenges associated with network-based defence that they will face between now and 2010. On-going Aquarium-related activities are being supported by (1) development of new network concepts for operational staff and decision processes, (2) formal meeting analysis, (3) implementation of Visual Interactive Language (VIL) concepts, and (4) production of advanced models and simulations. These activities will facilitate staff process by the development of new methods for the presentation, manipulation, and analyses of data and the development of new levels of understanding.