Eric DeMarco knows how to cut a wide swath through the Southern California defense community. He just jumps in the corporate car and tools around town.

It is a project that most officials and power industry leaders acknowledge will take 20 to 30 years. But already, government and industry representatives involved in upgrading the United States’ electrical infrastructure to the highly anticipated smart grid are reporting success in developing some of the first standards for the long-term nationwide project.

Whether it is floods in the Midwest United States, earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, blizzard conditions in Washington, D.C., or hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, one does not have to go far these days to see that natural disasters are becoming a bigger part of life. Nowhere does that reality come into focus more than at the nation’s military bases, where troops face the triple challenge of maintaining a state of readiness prior to disasters, working to serve as recovery resources, and being good neighbors where possible to the local communities they call home.

From the White House, to the Defense Department, and from corporate boardrooms to computer rooms across the country, the issue of protecting the networks of government and industry is increasingly leading to the development of new strategies and plans.

Last year, as the April 15 tax deadline approached, I realized that I did not have my W-2 statement from the Navy Reserve. I knew it was no problem because all of that information was “easily” available at MY-PAY online. That was simple—“simple” being a very relative term—when I had a Common Access Card (CAC) and reader. However, as a retired 0-6 without a CAC, there was no “simple” button available to make this process work.

NATO is reinforcing cybersecurity for its entire communications and information systems architecture and on all of its networks, including unclassified, restricted and secret networks. The project will be implemented in several phases and is speeding toward completion by the end of 2012, a challenging deadline that NATO officials say they are determined to meet.

NATO is reinforcing cybersecurity for its entire communications and information systems architecture and on all of its networks, including unclassified, restricted and secret networks. The project will be implemented in several phases and is speeding toward completion by the end of 2012, a challenging deadline that NATO officials say they are determined to meet.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but in Afghanistan’s eastern region, the need to connect dismounted soldiers to the network has prompted a mother lode of innovation. The forbidding area is unlike any other part of Afghanistan, according to U.S. Army officials. With mountains more than 20,000 feet high, much of the tough terrain is not traversable with ground vehicles, making dismounted operations a must in the area. Connecting those dismounted troops to the network is a critical necessity, which is why Army officials are experimenting with a host of prototypes designed to put dismounted soldiers on the digital map. Those systems include the Distributed Tactical Communications System, the Broadband Global Area Network satellite terminal and the Panther satellite communications system.

Troops soon will have access to an upgrade that allows them to counter one of their most complex foes—Mother Nature. A project at the U.S. Air Force Electronic Systems Center incorporates weather information with flight maps so crews can more quickly understand what the environment plans to throw their way and when.

The revelation that an unnamed defense contractor suffered a large-scale data breach emphasized the urgency and importance of a Defense Department strategy for operating in cyberspace.