The global communications challenges facing defense commands and civil organizations are enormous. Ongoing missions around the world include support to offensive and defensive operations, drug interdiction, humanitarian assistance, and peacekeeping.

These joint, multinational, and interagency operations must rely on an information infrastructure capable of supporting stringent interoperability requirements. The challenges include the classification, control, dissemination, and sharing of information between the United States and its coalition partners. Among other relevant concerns are multinational operations, global air traffic management, transportation and logistics, broadcast and multicast capabilities, and the extension of commercial capabilities across the international community.

For example, more than 2 million active duty and civilian personnel in the Department of Defense (DoD), nearly 50,000 in the Federal Aviation Administration, and more than 100,000 in the Internal Revenue Service have information needs. More than 500 military installations in the continental United States have local and global information needs. Worldwide intelligence production and homeland security capabilities may access and process massive amounts of open source information from more than 1,500 major daily newspapers in the United States and at least that many in other nations.

The immense scale and diversity of the worldwide community and its problems provide inherent challenges to implementing new and enhanced capabilities:

Requirements—How can we determine “user needs” in a global community? Is commonality in applications around the world required? How are localized needs to be handled? Must all requirements be met or can available commercial capabilities be used?

Planning, Programming, Designing—Which architecture pieces are worldwide and which can be localized? How should funding and acquisition be accomplished for worldwide capabilities?

Feasibility—Is a worldwide “system” feasible? How can the full breadth of global information problems be addressed?

Scalability—Can applications be made scalable for worldwide implementation? Is it reasonable to assume capabilities can be fielded and synchronized worldwide?

Security—How should security be implemented for sometimes separate, sometimes intersecting DoD, national, and international communities?

Development—What is effective and efficient? What is the development path for “large” systems versus focused smaller teams, centralized systems versus decentralized ones, and thick clients versus thin ones? How do these capabilities evolve?

The articles in this issue illustrate the range of MITRE’s technical contributions in addressing these questions to develop and sustain global information systems across DoD, diplomatic, intelligence, and civilian air control applications.

One article describes a traffic analysis system designed to improve air traffic control throughout the world. Another article reviews a number of approaches for information sharing in a multinational environment, including Partnership for Peace, the Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation System (BICES), and the proposed generic U.S. Multinational Information Infrastructure (USMII). Another describes MITRE’s recommendations to the foreign affairs community for a common platform supporting the varied needs of more than 40 agencies in nearly 200 countries. Another presents a roadmap to achieving a fully integrated joint force that supports various levels of conflict, including how to integrate existing architectures into a single, end-to-end information system environment where joint and coalition warfighters can share data and applications regardless of their location. We also describe a unified information capability designed to protect the homeland against new types of threats, such as weapons of mass destruction, the spread of infectious diseases, global organized crime, and narcotics trafficking.

Web and commercially available technology and methods provide us with capabilities to make worldwide systems feasible; we need to ensure we take advantage of these to fulfill U.S. government information needs.

Spurge Norman leads MITRE’s work program for the Department of Defense Unified Commands and defense intelligence around the world. He focuses on the challenges of worldwide information sharing every day. His organization includes staff from 30 locations around the globe. Mr. Norman’s MITRE career includes 13 years of engineering experience at DoD commands. During those years, he focused on worldwide capabilities, including global transportation, intelligence systems, and worldwide command and control systems. For more information, please contact guest editor Spurge Norman using the employee directory.