The Director of the U.S. Department of Defense Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) and the Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy welcome you to the 6th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium.

The theme for this year's symposium is Collaboration in the Information Age. Collaboration is essential to the C2 processes of future military operations. Those processes are becoming ever more distributed across functions, echelons, agencies, and coalition partners. Thus, collaboration is required for efficient and effective operations. Collaboration tools already are available and being improved, both commercially (COTS) and within governments (GOTS). However, recent experience shows that collaboration is rarely done well. Cultural barriers and differences in training, experience, background, and equipment are all impediments to good collaboration. Reluctance to share information, problems associated with learning how to use new tools, and lack of doctrine about how to collaborate are other difficulties that have to be addressed. Finally, there appears to be little agreement as to proper protocols for use of collaboration tools.

By bringing together experts from both the operational and technical communities from several countries, this symposium seeks to explore the nature of future military operations-including collaboration-and new approaches to command and control within the context of the Information Age environment.

As in the past, the morning sessions of this year's symposium are devoted to invited plenary speakers. They represent the policy and operational communities and private industry, and will address the nature of emerging challenges and their impact on critical command and control issues, new approaches and concepts for command and control architectures, organizations, doctrine, and command and control decision making. Afternoons sessions are organized into seven parallel "tracks" of presentations of papers. We realize that you may not be able to attend every presentation that you would like. However, all papers are available on this CDROM and on the CCRP Website: www.dodccrp.org.

We hope you also will consider participating in one or both of the 2002 Command and Control Research and Technology Symposia. The next "domestic" CCRTS will be held during the summer at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. The 7th International CCRTS will be held 16-20 September 2002 in Quebec City, Canada.