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When it comes to military technologies, it's all about the warfighter. The men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan know firsthand their greatest technological needs, and their counterparts back home are striving to provide them as quickly as possible. The combat experience also is providing grist for the design mill as engineers plan for the future. SIGNAL looks at the efforts underway to develop new warfighter technologies as well as what may lie ahead.

March 19: Managing virtual environments is becoming more complex, Federal initiatives are piling on, and your organization's infrastructure is what it is.

The U.S. military and its allies have embarked on a project to distribute and standardize geospatial information across all echelons of command. It is no secret that the United States and its allies are facing an agile, adaptive enemy. The danger of this reality is spurring coalition forces to alter how they disseminate information and intelligence, ensuring that commanders have the information they need in a timely manner.

Businesses, be aware and prepare. The latest wave of digital disruptions is rolling in, and future success depends on being ready for them and their effects. A comprehensive yearlong study reveals that, in the next three to five years, emerging technologies will reshape industry and initiate new business models.

U.S. Army researchers are speeding innovations to the battlefield by attaching them to system upgrades or adding them to large programs on the verge of fielding. The prevalence of software-driven systems allows for non-hardware improvements, and the modular nature of an increasing number of systems allows for new developments to be incorporated into them without adversely affecting their timeline or performance.

The proliferation of inexpensive yet high-quality transducers for acoustic, seismic and optical images, along with inexpensive and low-power digital signal processing and radios, enable improved target detection, classification, tracking and even location prediction. These capabilities are being demonstrated now in the prototypes of the U.S. Army’s Future Combat Systems Tactical Unattended Ground Sensor Program.

It’s a paperback! It’s a belt buckle! No, it’s a supercomputer! It’s a wearable supercomputer, actually, and it can clip onto a belt so users can take it anywhere they need to go. The product is part of a larger project designed to deliver the capabilities of a simulation center to warfighters instead of requiring them to travel to special facilities. If all goes according to plan, service members can expect the powerful new hardware as well as software and applications to transform their training when they receive the technology. And even if the plan goes awry, the open-source basis for the simulation still could benefit the military.

A data capture and marking technology permits images to describe where and by whom they were taken. The capability allows warfighters to take photographs on the battlefield that have embedded location coordinates and other data. These coded images then are loaded onto digital maps of a region. Studded with hyperlinked information, these maps provide commanders and analysts with immediate information about their operational zones.

As the military world continues its march toward network centricity, software developers are making strides toward better collaboration as well. A project expected to roll out in the next few months will connect disparate researchers, allowing them to share ideas and products. This open-source idea swapping takes practices already in place in the private sector and moves them into the defense arena with the aim of accelerating production time while reducing costs. The purpose is to enable the rapid development and certification of products for the Global Information Grid.

Telephonics Corporation has been awarded a $2 million follow-on contract from the U.S.