Coalition forces in Afghanistan are using a situational awareness system that alerts military patrols about mined roads and warns civilian relief convoys about traffic jams and possible insurgent activity. The capability fuses intelligence alerts and real-time tracking information to provide users with the location of civilian and NATO forces.

The Tennessee Army National Guard is using a network change and configuration management technology to monitor its networks proactively and warn administrators about potential trouble. The NetMRI system incorporates devices that integrate hardware and software to provide alerts and to allow problems to be remediated immediately. It also enables a small staff to monitor and manage a statewide network consisting of hundreds of nodes and facilities.

Estonia is the first nation in history to have experienced massive cyber attacks directed at its government and key infrastructure. The event, which took place over a three-week period in April and May 2007, marked the beginning of a new type of amorphous, hard-to-track threat to international security. Coming in successive waves, the attacks almost shut down the Baltic country’s government, which relies extensively upon online transactions and e-commerce. In the aftermath of the incident, the European Union and NATO launched a series of initiatives to strengthen national infrastructures and to improve communications between national and multinational organizations in the event of another cyber attack.

Networks no longer are a tidy complement to the work of defense agencies. As information gathering and processing have become faster and more essential to defense and security operations, those networks have evolved into essential tools. But the very barriers created in the justifiable zeal to protect these networks also are erecting significant roadblocks to information sharing, and the fallout affects the agencies’ ability to collaborate with allies, coalition partners and each other.

Some risks attend all travel in the domains of land, sea, air and outer space, but in those realms the voyager is afforded a patently acceptable measure of protection by laws, rules, sanctions against misbehavior, and social norms and comity. Aviators, firefighters, law enforcement officials, soldiers and others obliged to function in highly contested domains can seek added protection from partners who warn of danger from their rear perspective—their six o’clock.