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A unique flying antenna testbed plays a significant role in the development and integration of battlefield information networks and communications nodes. Moreover, this aircraft's primary function is to support airborne communications transition to production and fusion into new command and control networks.

U.S. Joint Forces Command is harnessing the power of extensible markup language to lash together three capabilities and to facilitate collaboration between intelligence and operations activities. If successful, the integrated capability would increase an individual warfighter's ability to control intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets and share targeting information, reducing the time between target identification and strike from minutes to seconds. Integration of those capabilities is in the experimental stage, but the project's director is encouraged by the initial results and believes it could eventually lead to humans on instead of in the targeting-strike loop.

With updated cabling and server farms in place, the U.S. Navy is making way on a government-owned, government-operated information technology initiative that ultimately will affect more than 41,000 users in Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. During the coming months, sailors stationed at bases outside the continental United States, beyond the scope of the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet, will be coming aboard their own enterprisewide network.

A prototype over-the-horizon communications system and an on-the-move command post that allows commanders to conduct fully mobile operations could help the U.S. Marine Corps maintain connectivity and situational awareness on the battlefield. Developed by the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, both systems support the service's doctrine of ship-to-objective maneuver, which calls for the rapid deployment of troops and equipment from the seat to staging areas deep inside enemy territory.

Networking capabilities that increase situational awareness are moving down the chain of command and eliminating bottlenecks in data sharing. Work underway on the Pathfinder advanced concept technology demonstration aims at integrating capabilities so that information gathered by unmanned ground vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles and unattended ground sensors can be distributed within a mobile, self-forming, self-healing network. The system is designed for use by special operations and lightweight conventional forces in small team operations.

An electrically conductive resin technology may soon free warfighter and civilian wireless devices from bulky aerials. The proprietary recipe can be added to any of the thousands of polymers used to manufacture cases and components, turning the entire bezel of a cellular telephone or handheld radio into an antenna.

The U.S. military is developing a modular, scalable, multifunctional radio frequency system that would provide unprecedented interoperability through its communications and data gateway while performing signals intelligence collection, electronic warfare and psychological operations broadcast. The technology incorporates common radio frequency hardware components networked with pools of processors that are programmed through software to instantiate a variety of radio frequency capabilities and perform multiple radio frequency functions simultaneously.

A team of researchers from industry, academia and the U.S. Defense Department is creating high-speed, long-range communication technologies that will help eliminate the fog of war and take the element of surprise away from the enemy. The secure laser-based system will offer communication uplink speeds in the multigigabit-per-second range and will improve tracking so communications can be transmitted to satellites from mobile platforms. The research also will lead to aberration-free three-dimensional imaging at distances of more than 600 miles.

An experimental communications system may provide future combat vehicle crews with access to high-bandwidth intelligence and command and control applications. Part of a larger U.S. Defense Department effort to improve troops' ability to receive and send data, this research program is developing technologies to open communications channels down to the most spectrum-starved tactical user.

The Office of Naval Research and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center are testing a commercial Web technology that will boost network centricity in the program management process. An enterprise weblog, a Web-based journal that supports information sharing, communication and collaboration all in one medium, is being employed during the test and evaluation phase of a night-vision technology project.