Every service has faced changes brought about by new technologies and new missions, but the Air Force is wrestling with nothing less than a total overhaul of its structure and activities. Its legacy mission was fairly clear-cut: maintain air superiority and provide support to ground forces where needed. But now, experts are building a new force of unmanned combat air vehicles that vie in importance with piloted craft. And, the Global War on Terrorism and the information technology revolution have struck at the very heart of the Air Force’s raison d’etre. SIGNAL takes a look at how the Air Force is changing to meet its new roles and which technologies might play a major role in them.

The Air Force leads the military in speed of force over great distances, and maintaining command and control of that force is a challenge that is becoming more complex with technology innovations. Leading off this focus report is Air Force Morphs Command and Control, an article on how the Air Force is doing more than modernizing its command and control—it is restructuring it to suit its new responsibilities while it incorporates some of the most modern information technologies.

A number of those information technologies come under the eye of Executive Editor Maryann Lawlor. She writes about a new beyond-line-of-sight capability that is being incorporated aboard E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS) aircraft. This technology is changing the way the Air Force moves information across its networks, she reports in Information Sharing Flies High.

Moving information across Air Force networks is the topic of an article by News Editor Rita Boland. She reports on how the U.S. Air Forces Northern Distributed Mission Operations program is conducting individualized warfighter training from various locations simultaneously. Network Offers Top-Notch Training to More for Less describes how diverse components can practice homeland security missions through the distributed training network.

Still up in the air, but operating in a joint mode, is the topic of Multipurpose Missile Program Accelerates, by Business Editor Henry S. Kenyon. He writes about a new smart air-to-ground missile that can be carried on several different types of U.S. aircraft, both fixed- and rotary-wing. His page 33 article looks at how this joint missile would replace as many as three different missiles in the existing U.S. arsenal.

Research and development is the seed corn of our technology driven world. With the commercial sector providing many of the military’s new technologies, the old lines delineating military and commercial technologies are blurring into nonexistence. The defense community is working with academia and the private sector to an ever greater degree, and the rapid pace of commercial information technology innovation is increasing the importance of laboratory research. SIGNAL Magazine’s June issue looks at some of the new technologies about to emerge from the laboratory and the effect they might have in this technology-driven age.

Bleeding-edge research increasingly is looking at the effects of new and future technologies, and Rita Boland and Maryann Lawlor join forces to lead off this focus report with “Patterns Emerge From Chaos,” a writeup on how Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers are trying to model chaos from simple behavior patterns.

Shape shifting is the topic of Henry Kenyon’s article, “Programmable Matter Research Solidifies.” He reports on research into programmable matter that would assemble itself into complex three-dimensional objects on command. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program is striving for diverse objects that could assemble themselves into useful gear, but advances in this realm ultimately could lead to Terminator 2-type matter that can change its very nature.

Electronics also may become more flexible in the near term, as Kenyon describes in his next article, “Flexible Circuits Unfold.” His article looks at research into flexible circuitry that literally could be painted on warfighter uniforms to provide all sorts of functions currently limited to boxy devices.

Boland returns with an article on an ongoing effort to create a new qubit. No, that is not a modern form of a Biblical unit of measurement; it is a quantum bit that would operate as a processing element in a futuristic computer. The future may be nearer than most people realize, as she reports in “Science and Technology Challenge Strives to Create First-of-Its-Kind Qubit.”

When it comes to military technologies, it’s all about the warfighter. The men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan know firsthand their greatest technological needs, and their counterparts back home are striving to provide them as quickly as possible. The combat experience also is providing grist for the design mill as engineers plan for the future. SIGNAL looks at the efforts underway to develop new warfighter technologies as well as what may lie ahead.

The laboratory is the birthplace of many technologies, and the U.S. Army’s Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center, or CERDEC, is developing a range of new systems. “Appliqués Speed New Technologies to the Front” describes how the center is moving new technologies into the battlefield by inserting them into existing programs, while it also researches innovative technologies for long-term efforts.

One of the keys to success in the battlespace is situational awareness, and the U.S. Joint Forces Command is teaming with the Army Topographic Engineering Center to integrate geospatial data with command and control information. In “Echelons and Partners Soon Will Be on Common Ground,” News Editor Rita Boland writes how this effort will help move geospatial information across all echelons of command.

Business Editor Henry S. Kenyon reports on a new Defense Department data-tagging tool that embeds location coordinates into battlefield imagery. Troops can load geographically coded images onto maps for dissemination and archiving, as Kenyon describes in “Image Tagging Stores Vital Data.”

Moving that geographic information down to the individual Warfighter depends on many key links in the command and control chain. Boland returns to report in “Colossal Computing Power, Itty Bitty Storage Space,” about a small wearable supercomputer that can be clipped onto a belt. This Lilliputian processor can deliver the capabilities of a simulation center to individual warfighters in the field.