Association Feature

In the coming decade, the mantra of doing more without more could become one of the defining hallmarks of military communications—not only for the United States, but also among the nation’s coalition partners and allies.

New security concerns are vying with the global financial crisis as NATO’s Allied Command Transformation attempts to keep abreast of the dynamic field of global security. Gen. Stéphane Abrial, FRAF, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, opened the eighth ACT Industry Day held in London in September by emphasizing that affordability is today’s important word.

For the leadership of the Defense Information Systems Agency, the opportunity to meet and greet with the contractors and companies that supply mission-critical applications and hardware is vital to their mission. That is why DISA has been holding its Customer and Industry Forum for the last several years.

Leaders of the U.S. Army’s cybercommunity have outlined plans for the network of 2020. Reductions in force, cuts to budgets and advances in technology all will play roles in shaping upcoming cyberoperations. The Army also is revolutionizing the way it approaches integration to the network, moving testing out of war zones and into exercises that simulate current battlefield conditions.

The severity of the global financial crisis has permeated budgeting within the defense sector, and indications are that the cuts will go far deeper than many of the experts believe is practical. As a result, the task at hand is to shape the future in a very different budget environment than ever before, with leaders being challenged to make decisions without the benefit of historical models. The fiscal crisis in the United States is its primary security threat today, according to Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, USA, former commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command.
Gen. Odierno joined other high-ranking military and civilian officials offering nontraditional glimpses of the future at Joint Warfighting 2011, held May 10-12 in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

When it comes to the transition from command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) systems to cloud computing architectures, both the challenge—and the promise—boil down to “getting the right information to the right individual at the right time and doing it securely.”

Gen. Keith Alexander, USA, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, is calling for greater international cooperation on cyber defense. “We don’t have a U.S. network, a Canadian network, a Mexican network. It’s all one network. We all operate that, and we have to have international partners to protect it,” Gen. Alexander emphasized.

The dynamic environment that defines trends from social development to technology innovation is wreaking havoc on attempts to plan an effective national security structure. Coupled with severe budget limitations arising from the global economic crisis, this rapidly changing milieu is revolutionizing warfighting in ways that cannot be countered—or even predicted—on short notice.

Cyberspace concerns extend throughout the Asia-Pacific region, and they increasingly are playing key roles in how nations define security—and threats. Traditional area geopolitical rivalries are enhanced by the potential for cyberoperations, and nations once secure behind rugged borders or vast bodies of water now face potential threats to their national infrastructure through a realm that knows no borders.

Computer networks are essential to global productivity and collaboration. They also are weapons: More harm is possible from a network attack than from a machine gun, according to experts gathered in London to discuss cyberwar.