Viewpoint

The task seemed simple enough: The U.S. military services should use a technological edge to adapt forces to whatever type of fight came to pass. They were prodded by an impatient secretary of defense who saw information technology as the means to win conventional wars quickly with less force. But, U.S. armed forces also were instructed by the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review to prepare for combat operations against new, elusive nonstate foes, with a focus on multiple irregular, asymmetric operations. They also had to give equal weight to combat and sustainability operations.

The U.S. intelligence community must centralize both collection and analysis to most effectively leverage technical and analytic expertise. Restructuring the intelligence community as a technical core of collection capabilities, surrounded by an analytic corps organized by areas of responsibility, would improve efficiency, depth and transparency of intelligence analysis.

Having long relied upon military prowess and diplomatic skills to project and protect its interests on the seas, on land and in aerospace, the United States now is in conflict with stateless entities seeking hearts and minds, not land or treasure. It is a global contest of words and images, waged on a battlefield called cyberspace where rules of engagement that govern traditional conflict don’t apply and plans for a multiagency effort to protect the information infrastructure have not yet been adopted.

The attacks on the United States in 2001 resulted in the intelligence community gaining tremendous power and resources to pursue U.S. adversaries around the world. Immediately after the attacks, the community began to augment its work force through rapid outsourcing, and this change in staffing led to new issues that had not been dealt with before.

This crude but highly effective approach might be just what U.S. federal information technology officials need. Those charged with managing the government's information technology networks—its vital nervous system—should remind themselves, "It's the architecture!" The present paradigm is hopelessly insecure and inefficient. No amount of federal largesse invested in the U.S. government's current Web-based architecture will ever take the nation where it needs to be. As the old Yankee once told the bewildered New York tourist seeking directions to Kennebunkport, Maine, "You can't get there from here."

Responding to a soldier's complaint about equipment inadequacies in Iraq, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld replied, "You go to war with the army you have, not with the army you want," and his remark was condemned as an unforgivable excuse for gross mismanagement. While warranted, that criticism could be leveled at most administrations in U.S. history when arms are stacked and forgotten at war's end. Today, mismanagement is exemplified by the current reliance on information operations amid network centricity, which offers as much vulnerability as advantage.

The U.S. Air Force is building a robust cyberwar capability as part of a revised mission that adds cyberspace to the service's fighting domains of air and space. As part of this effort, the secretary of the Air Force and the chief of staff of the Air Force established a Cyberspace Task Force to help frame the service's direction in this third domain. The task force is working to harness capabilities, take stock of gaps and vulnerabilities, and increase awareness about cyberspace.

The United States needs a national emergency communications architecture to provide standards that public safety responders at all levels can rely on for coordination of efforts. Legislation could be necessary to ensure that commercial carriers are part of the solution as the government seeks to leverage commercial, state, federal and defense assets to form a standardized emergency network.

Military commanders looking for a battlefield advantage that can tip the balance dramatically in their favor may be able to benefit soon from a promising new technology application. Called predictive insight, it holds the potential not just of making the concept of complete battlespace awareness a reality but also of taking that concept a giant step further.

The Sender Policy Framework is an emerging Internet standard that could cause a large part of the U.S. Army's legitimate e-mail to be categorized as spam and dropped. Large e-mail providers in the commercial world are in the initial phases of implementing the framework, and while deleterious effects on Army e-mail have been rare so far, they are almost guaranteed to grow as more providers and intermediaries adopt the standard. However, several courses of action can address the issue, and Army Knowledge Online already has taken steps to implement the framework while simultaneously protecting the future viability of the service's e-mail system.