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Creation of a national operations and analysis hub is finding grudging acceptance among senior officials in the U.S. national security community. This fresh intelligence mechanism would link federal agencies to provide instant collaborative threat profiling and analytical assessments for use against asymmetrical threats. National policy makers, military commanders and law enforcement agencies would be beneficiaries of the hub's information.

The U.S. defense intelligence community is changing its information philosophy from emphasis on-call functional or geopolitical expertise toward rapid access to relevant knowledge from vast data files. To accommodate this shift, new technologies are enabling planners to implement an information architecture designed to provide authorized customers with streamlined access to vital information or expertise.

The National Security Agency is spearheading a U.S. Defense Department effort to develop, with commercial assistance, joint tactical signals intelligence systems. The agency has formed a steering group to shape an architecture for generating standards around which industry will design and build the next generation of tactical signals intelligence systems.

Intelligence-gathering techniques perfected by the government have made their way from the battlefield to the boardroom and now to corporate war rooms. These distinctively designed facilities are headquarters to a company's team of specialists who provide decision makers with knowledge that is critical to corporate survival and growth in today's highly competitive environment.

The National Security Agency is reorganizing its structure and activities to serve as a full-fledged participant in military operations. This break from its traditional role of providing support to decision makers and warfighters reflects the growing magnitude of information in military operations.

New data storage and retrieval techniques are allowing theater air mission planners to call up detailed imagery and mapping data from a laptop computer. Using commercial hardware and software, U.S. forces directed attack and rescue missions during the recent Kosovo conflict by accessing continentwide data contained in a single box.

The U.S. Army is developing new countermeasures to defeat smarter air defense threats, including systems that rely on radar targeting technology. The recently introduced suite of tools detects, identifies, locates and jams modern gun and missile radars.

The U.S. Air Force has demonstrated the ability to provide airborne joint surveillance target attack radar system operators with real-time video ground imagery from an unmanned aerial vehicle. The capability allows positive identification of targets, decreased reporting and response times for attacking critical targets, and reduced fratricide.

Sails billowing from strong economic, technology and military winds, the U.S. ship of state is tacking toward the future, seeking to shape its own strategic environment. Dead ahead in Asian waters, however, are ominous heavy weather and treacherous shoals. The U.S. military and its allies are facing a growing number of hostile rogue states that are equipping themselves with dangerous technologies designed to thwart power projection.

Highly refined signal filters will open new vistas in applications ranging from complex intelligence gathering to cellular telephony. The advances emerge from high-temperature superconducting materials incorporated into semiconductor chips. Researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have moved some aspects of this technology to the private sector for production and commercialization.