Reaching beyond the traditional domains of sea, land, air, space and cyberspace, the U.S. military now is exploring its newest realm: the virtual world. The services are creeping cautiously into the latest frontier of simulated worlds with islands and avatars. This is not a simple maneuver. It is one filled with hurdles and pitfalls, but it is a domain that the U.S. Defense Department understands it can ignore no longer.

Researchers from military laboratories are studying the human element in detecting explosive devices, trying to determine if certain people have an instinct for locating the weapons and, if so, what characteristics they share. The results add another piece to the puzzle in the Defense Department’s efforts to counter improvised explosive devices. The work already has uncovered certain facets of information that military commanders can use to identify troops with innate abilities or to train warfighters in specific skills.

Two key projects are defining U.S. Army intelligence efforts to improve its analytic capabilities. While their aim is the same—allowing analysts to process key intelligence information faster and more efficiently—they take opposite approaches to the common goal.

The U.S. Army training community now can take advantage of an online resource that combines official doctrine with traditional and Web 2.0 technologies. Following in the footsteps of other military niches that have created communities on the Internet, training personnel have transformed a tasking to revise a field manual into development of a Web site that offers one-stop shopping for educators’ needs. The online applications are available to anyone with the right credentials, and the more people contribute to the content, the more powerful the tools will become.

The U.S. Army is launching a military career path focused on electronic warfare to support its forces deployed in Southwest Asia. This occupational field meets a demand by commanders to have skilled personnel operating the mobile jamming equipment that has become common throughout the theater. However, the Army is still in the process of establishing the occupation’s management, training courses and related doctrine.

The U.S. Army’s ambitious and controversial Future Combat Systems program to develop a family of networked combat vehicles, robots and sensors has been cancelled and is being broken up into three separate programs. These three divergent efforts will focus on new ground vehicles; technological upgrades, or spinouts, for all Army units; and network and software development. The changes are part of an undertaking to bring new capabilities into service over the next 15 years.

Building networks and speeding new information technologies into the field are changing U.S. Army acquisition permanently, according to a general tasked with maintaining connectivity among diverse forces. The need for commercial networking technologies and capabilities, along with the exigencies of warfighters facing unconventional combat, are impelling the Army to accelerate new technologies to the front and to change programs concurrently.

At the heart of "DoD Information System Certification and Accreditation Reciprocity" is the policy that if a system owner from any service hands a certified and accredited system to the network owner from any other service, the network owner should have the confidence that putting that system on his or her network will not result in creating information assurance or related vulnerabilities. Can we handle this?