If you're like me, after the activity from this fall, you need a few days away from the usually grind to refocus your planning. I did this in August and it was amazingly refreshing. (Actually, I need a six month sabbatical but that will have to wait!) Over the holidays (or in January) is a great time to relax and consider your business development activities since Labor Day.

Members of the U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Joint Enabling Capabilities (JEC) Command arrived home from Afghanistan and the first major operational use of the Ready JEC Package (RJP) just in time to join their families for the Thanksgiving holiday.

The news earlier this year that the U.S. Marine Corps was banning social media sent some people into a near tizzy. How could it do such a thing? Aside from the fact that it was not what Marine Corps officials actually said—for security reasons they prohibited Marines from using applications such as Facebook and Twitter on Marine Corps computer networks—the move by the Marine Corps, and the uproar surrounding it, spurred the Pentagon to examine its policies surrounding these collaborative tools and to assess how they are treated.

Periodically, we ask the senior leadership of the global security community to give us feedback on their top priorities in the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence and information technology domains. In the past couple of years, they have been fairly consistent in saying that their top priority is interagency and coalition information sharing.

The U.S. Navy is designing its newest intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting system to fit advanced information systems that already have begun to take shape ashore and afloat. The first increment is receiving its shipboard introduction as a major milestone nears this spring.

The U.S. Navy is transitioning from network-centric to info-centric as it adjusts for the changing missions of the 21st century. The shift represents less a technology change than an organizational and operational one as the sea service faces more diverse missions with fewer assets.