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Introduction From the beginning of recorded history of warfare, victory—or defeat—often depended on being able to accurately anticipate the enemy’s likely actions. As late as World War II, tactical decisions were often based on one commander’s understanding of his opponent on the battlefield. Critical command and control decisions were supported by primitive situation awareness (e.g., behind-the-lines spies and, later, aerial photos). Today, however, commanders are faced with a myriad of operational challenges including overwhelming amounts of intelligence on net-centric backbones; reduced manning; more agile, creative and flexible adversaries; and the need to operate in, and rapidly switch between, a wide range of mission types. And even near real-time situation awareness does not provide adequate planning information. Commanders need true Situation Understanding or Sensemaking technologies that integrate a range of intelligence and inferencing services that present credible predictions of the enemy’s most likely, and most dangerous, courses of action Net-Centric Sensemaking Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (LM ATL) is actively engaged in the research, development and transition to operations of advanced Net-Centric Sensemaking (NCS) technologies. NCS produces a Common Relevant Operating Picture (CROP) that supports more effective command and control decision-making. The quality, and resulting effectiveness, of these command decisions are directly related to the accuracy, completeness, currency and ease of comprehension of the CROP. LM ATL’s NCS architecture retrieves, analyzes and fuses data resident on net-centric backbones to meet selected, specific information needs of commanders, providing tools to improve knowledge management and the decisionmaking process. To achieve more rapid decision-making, the time interval between obtaining raw data (the observing) and decision- making (the acting) must be as brief as possible. NCS allows commanders to work within the enemy’s decision-making cycle— i.e., observe, understand and act faster than the enemy. NCS decisionmaking must also be sufficiently accurate to avoid fratricide and collateral damage. NCS processes information needs in two ways, explicitly and implicitly. Explicit information needs are those specifically requested by the decisionmaker. Implicit information needs are generated by the NCS architecture. NCS contains logic that can infer the most likely information the decisionmaker needs. For example, determining the size, heading and intent of a crowd in the vicinity of the commander could be one such instance of a derived information need. Implicit information needs can be generated both when commanders have no time to express their needs (e.g., under fire) or when the decisionmaker may have overlooked or failed to explore a certain analysis of the current situation. The NCS architecture has been successfully exercised in a number of domains including Army small unit operations in urban environments, Air Force strategic planning and Homeland Security maritime protection missions.