Multi-Sensor Fusion, Communications and Information Warfare,

Abstract : Todays fusion problems are chiefly concerned with organizational and procedural issues. The technology they employ is mostly available state-of-the-art. The future brings a new set of concerns centered about issues that are more technical in nature. Future military command and control and weapons systems will likely be more distributed, more automated and smarter. They will probably include an advanced form of information warfare where sensing, information exchange, jamming, deception, and misinformation will be capable of being managed and orchestrated from a total mission objective perspective. As a result, the future fusion process will be required to handle and process on orders of magnitude increase in the volume and diversity of input data, faster. It will need to produce a great variety of information to feed automated C2 and weapons systems data bases through more interactive and responsive interfaces than exist today. At the same time it needs to analyze this data at a deeper level of understanding than ever before, scrutinizing and drawing inferences and conclusions about ones adversaries underlying beliefs, readiness, intentions and future actions from what is often times a suspect and spotty data base. Finally, these conclusions and inferences need to be presented in a clear, concise, honest, but convincing and timely manner. This paper presents a unified framework from which the necessary information may be fused, managed and presented to support command in such a future information warfare environment and discusses the associated technical challenges. This paper reviews various ongoing research programs that are addressing these challenges. (Author)