Joint-service weapons intelligence teams around Iraq are deriving insights about enemies’ use of weapons in the country. The work helps coalition forces alter their operations and tactics to better avoid prevalent dangers. The knowledge of perpetrators’ methods and identities aids in the fight against various weapons, especially improvised explosive devices. Team members processing sites collect information about explosives, then report on their findings, adding to intelligence databases and troop knowledge.

The U.S. Navy is outfitting its ships with unclassified wireless networks that will allow sailors and marines to move around a vessel with laptops and personal digital assistants.

A new radio undergoing trials with the U.S. military soon may allow joint and coalition warfighters’ legacy radios to interoperate without the need for human-directed spectrum management. The radio combines several technologies that allow it to serve as a gateway linking disparate radios and datalinks together into a digital network. The radio is able to avoid the interference and disruptions common to wireless communications in tactical battlefield environments.

The U.S. military and industry are developing a handheld device that will provide warfighters in the battlespace the same capabilities that are the lifeblood of most teenagers in developed countries: texting, data, voice and video-on-demand in the palms of their hands. Creating this information-sharing phenomenon takes more than just handing iPhones out to soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Because warfighters often operate in places with less-than-ideal infrastructure and need secure channels, delivering these Swiss Army knives of communications gadgets requires stratospheric support.

Energy as a weapon and an enabler could dominate future battlefields, according to a recent war game that focused on military energy requirements. Participants in the 2009 war game, which had the theme “Future Energy Requirement on the Battlefield,” examined energy produced, packaged and used in novel ways to enable persistence.

Cloud computing can solve many problems that state and federal governments are experiencing with traditional network-based systems. Through its cost-effective, flexible options, cloud computing enables organizations to move the burden of network management from their own staff to a host environment.

A new competition is opening up the process of developing and improving virtual training environments by streamlining the rules and requirements for participation. By reaching out to the global design and development community, the Federal Virtual World Challenge seeks innovative, outside-the-box ideas to provide the U.S. government with virtual training and analysis technologies.

October is Cyber Awareness Month. This is an excellent effort to spread the word about cyber safety and reinforce the policies, procedures and best business practices that support sound information assurance (IA).