The challenges of the Pacific region and cyberwarfare issues dominated discussion on the second day of TechNet Asia-Pacific 2009.

The NC3A installed communications in a new headquarters in record time.

The opening session of TechNet Asia-Pacific 2009 was a four-hour acquisition seminar titled "Cyber Security—Its Acquisition and Environment."

I just returned from a large AFCEA conference that was well attended by military personnel - both uniformed and civilian. If you generally see the glass as half-full (and employ the few tips offered below), then conferences (both large and small) can be great opportunities to engage the clients; however, without the right attitude, they can be very unsatisfying. The key is to understand how to harvest these events for all they're worth and go into them with a plan. Here are my top tips for small business owners to make these conferences work.

Change is never easy, and that is particularly true in government. When it comes to collaboration, it is the intelligence community that has been evolving and testing its own boundaries.

A multitude of sentries stand between state-of-the-art solutions and warfighters’ hands. The acquisition bureaucracy has become so convoluted that even urgent need requests are feeling the effects. Debating the way around or right through the administrative sentinels that procurement professionals face in the government was the focus of AFCEA International’s SOLUTIONS Series event, “IT Acquisition: Shifting to a Modern Paradigm.” At the September event in Lansdowne, Virginia, identifying the problems was not a challenge; agreeing on the most expedient way to solve them was a little more difficult.

AFCEA increasingly is engaged in the effort to improve the acquisition process, particularly as it supports the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) and information technology communities. The association addresses this critical topic in this edition of SIGNAL; it has supported some workshops to discuss specific aspects of the problem; and it has held two conferences in the past several months on acquisition.

The threat to cyberspace now rivals that of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. That is the message in the latest effort to rouse the public from slumber induced by ignorance, indifference, apathy, confusion and denial. Government is inundated with reports and studies from think tanks, academia, prestigious government research agencies and the cybersecurity industry—each decrying the weak and deteriorating state in our cyberdefenses and proffering advice to the new administration.

Protection of the Global Information Grid now has evolved into global asymmetric warfare. Engaging in this combat is the principal mission of the U.S. Cyber Command because the infrastructure of the Internet is fundamentally insecure, and the U.S. Defense Department depends increasingly on this cyber highway to function. There are tens of thousands of defenders of the Internet infrastructure who must be vigilant around the clock, everywhere. Meanwhile, small teams of attackers can strike undetected whenever they choose, from wherever they may be in the world. This is why the contests between the defenders and the aggressors meet the definition of asymmetric warfare in its extreme form.

Upgrades to a major command and control system soon will provide U.S. commanders with better tools to coordinate theater- and strategic-level operations.