February 2012

No man may be an island, but each U.S. military base may become an energy island if a joint project among the Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department comes to fruition.

Future command and control systems may have agility serving as the foundation for their success. Changes in missions, enabling technologies and threats are altering the landscape for command and control capabilities at all levels of military operations.

The U.S. Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs have launched an effort to combine their two electronic health record systems into one. This integrated Electronic Health Record will track medical care from the day military members join the service through the rest of their lives.

For many, the words "homeland security" and "counterterrorism" conjure up images of federal investigators engaged in large-scale battle with a host of enemies bent on death and destruction. But the war often begins on a smaller, more subtle level.

Battlefield medicine has advanced significantly since the days when surgeons used whiskey as an anesthetic, and in the last year several new technologies have rolled out to deployed soldiers facing physical or psychological disorders. The U.S. Army program responsible for fielding software and the hardware on which it resides is pushing the cutting edge of diagnostics and treatment to the tip of the spear. Personnel hope the effort will save lives and limbs not only by treating injury or illness, but also by keeping troops off the road in war zones.

I don’t think anyone would argue with my notion that we live in a dangerous world and that, no matter where you live, there are significant threats to national and regional security.

In the next two years, federal officials plan to unveil a new means for providing emergency information to the U.S. public.

The Department of Homeland Security is adapting intelligence community tools to facilitate information sharing among its diverse elements. These include social media-based successes as well as information fusion centers across the nation.

The adoption of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has opened up new opportunities for reducing information technology costs. Now, the U.S. Defense Department must enter this option into its planning.

The path to achieving the vital goal of coalition interoperability may require abandoning longtime networking tenets in favor of a data-centric or knowledge management approach.