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A metamorphosis in the U.S. Army military intelligence community closely mirrors the changes seen throughout the service as it embarks on the transformation to a full-spectrum force-the Objective Force. The service's conversion is motivated by an increase in the diversity and number of threats, the creation of new technologies, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. These same factors have military intelligence leaders assessing the part that their personnel and technology will play in future operations. And, as in the past, it will be a critical role and one that will grow and change in proportion to the number of adversaries and missions.

The World Wide Web's commercial revolution is feeding new capabilities to Intelink, the intelligence community's independent intranet. As usage increases and information grows exponentially, Intelink is adapting Web tools to serve the increasingly complex needs of a secure network.

Several months of Russian attacks have shifted the balance of power in Chechnya and changed U.S. thinking about urban warfare. After suffering stunning public defeats just a few years ago, Russian forces applied painful lessons learned then to drive Chechen forces out of their capital city, Grozny, this year. Yet, according to U.S. analysts, this may have merely altered the thrust of battle, not resolved it. And, the tactics employed by both sides are forcing U.S. experts to take another look at the concept of urban warfare.

Creation of a national operations and analysis hub is finding grudging acceptance among senior officials in the U.S. national security community. This fresh intelligence mechanism would link federal agencies to provide instant collaborative threat profiling and analytical assessments for use against asymmetrical threats. National policy makers, military commanders and law enforcement agencies would be beneficiaries of the hub's information.

The U.S. defense intelligence community is changing its information philosophy from emphasis on-call functional or geopolitical expertise toward rapid access to relevant knowledge from vast data files. To accommodate this shift, new technologies are enabling planners to implement an information architecture designed to provide authorized customers with streamlined access to vital information or expertise.

The National Security Agency is spearheading a U.S. Defense Department effort to develop, with commercial assistance, joint tactical signals intelligence systems. The agency has formed a steering group to shape an architecture for generating standards around which industry will design and build the next generation of tactical signals intelligence systems.

Intelligence-gathering techniques perfected by the government have made their way from the battlefield to the boardroom and now to corporate war rooms. These distinctively designed facilities are headquarters to a company's team of specialists who provide decision makers with knowledge that is critical to corporate survival and growth in today's highly competitive environment.

The National Security Agency is reorganizing its structure and activities to serve as a full-fledged participant in military operations. This break from its traditional role of providing support to decision makers and warfighters reflects the growing magnitude of information in military operations.

New data storage and retrieval techniques are allowing theater air mission planners to call up detailed imagery and mapping data from a laptop computer. Using commercial hardware and software, U.S. forces directed attack and rescue missions during the recent Kosovo conflict by accessing continentwide data contained in a single box.

The U.S. Army is developing new countermeasures to defeat smarter air defense threats, including systems that rely on radar targeting technology. The recently introduced suite of tools detects, identifies, locates and jams modern gun and missile radars.