Colonel on Information Sharing

Lt. Col. Pamela Woolley, USAF, chapter vice president and commander of the 45th Space Communications Squadron, spoke at the November meeting on "21st Century Information Sharing.” Using a briefing developed over two years at the Defense Department level, the colonel illustrated how networking is developing. The military interest in information sharing comes from the warfighter's need to communicate with nearby field units who may be in the same fray or who can help. Within a unit these needs can change in an instant, and thus flexibility is the key to communications systems. Col. Woolley pointed out that the communications methods of the 21st century include chat rooms, Twitter, Facebook and texting, which have a person-to-person style. Moving to cloud computing, she told the group that there were two big advantages of that approach: significant reductions in user hardware and rapidity of meeting changing needs. The user buys computing service from a provider who owns and operates the equipment and serves many users.