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The next threat” is the biggest worry facing the U.S. intelligence community, according to its director. While terrorism is the current primary threat facing the security of the Free World, the purveyors of terrorism might take new approaches to tactics and procedures that would change the nature of their threat—and the type of damage that they could inflict on an innocent populace. The same players would be doing harm, but they would be striking in entirely different ways—and they might be joining forces with others to pursue their agenda of destruction.

An experimental radio technology could provide U.S. warfighters with assured access to voice, data and video communications. The prototype systems use an advanced wireless networking capability to link troops with larger networks such as the Global Information Grid. The radios also are capable of sensing the electromagnetic environment and selecting frequencies that are not in use automatically.

Technology resembling the human immune system is enhancing security for ad hoc mobile wireless networks on the battlefield. It will automate operations; offer unique, enhanced protection to communications assets; and relieve troops from constant network-monitoring. The result is increased user trust in the network.

A tiny device the size of a sugar cube may revolutionize military communications and sensor systems. The technology is a micro-scale atomic clock designed to help spectrum-hopping radios synchronize their frequencies and access signals from navigation satellites. This prototype time keeper is undergoing testing to determine its readiness for military applications.

The U.S. Army is changing communications equipment faster than it can deploy forces equipped with that gear. The force benefits from improved networking capabilities, but this rapid technology insertion is changing the way communications battalions train and deploy.

The U.S. intelligence community must centralize both collection and analysis to most effectively leverage technical and analytic expertise. Restructuring the intelligence community as a technical core of collection capabilities, surrounded by an analytic corps organized by areas of responsibility, would improve efficiency, depth and transparency of intelligence analysis.

U.S. government agencies recognize the effect that Web 2.0 technologies are having on society, and some are eagerly incorporating them into their operations. However, unlike previous eras in which government embraced new capabilities routinely, today’s efforts go beyond merely adapting to innovative technologies. The Web 2.0 revolution is impelling cultural change faster and to a greater degree than ever experienced in recorded history, and democracies that answer to their populaces already are feeling the effects of that change—and ignore those effects at their own risk.

According to the military and its partners, for the United States to succeed in the Global War on Terrorism, they must be able to share biometrics information across a network-centric environment. To that end, personnel at various agencies are developing new architectures and streamlining methods to identify terrorists based on their unique characteristics, and they are putting systems in place to efficiently share that information. The most useful pieces of a variety of stovepipe systems already in place are being combined to create a synchronized joint program.

If Howard Lance ever decides to sell his 22-foot motorboat docked at his home on the Intracoastal Waterway in central Florida, he could honestly advertise the craft as “hardly used.”

The U.S. military is facing a host of missions in all areas of symmetric and asymmetric warfare. These include counterdrug operations, cyberwarfare, stopping piracy, maritime domain awareness and diverse operations in the Global War on Terrorism. And, many of these challenges are linked in ways that threaten Free World security.