Bill Putnam shares his insights from his year-long service in Iraq as head of the Coalition?s Open Source Intelligence Cell on why the Coalition is losing the all-important information war in Iraq.
When anti-coalition forces in Iraq used jammers last year to thwart Global Positioning System precision-guided munitions in that theater, it represented a new, but not unexpected, challenge for the U.S. military: The first time an adversary challenged its dominance in space.
The Air Force and the Army are working on a classified project to use new combinations of surveillance aircraft and other sensors, along with intelligence on the ground, to try to detect and counter the increasingly deadly ambushes against American forces in Iraq.
Analysts now suspect that a fleet of Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles weren't designed to dispense biological or chemical weapons but were actually unarmed reconnaissance drones.
Just before their Net connections were bombed offline, Iraqis scoured an American information-warfare site in an apparent effort at self-defense. The attempt, futile as it may have been, illustrates the Web's growing role in military conflict.
United Nations nuclear inspectors, barred from Iraq by Washington, are increasingly worried that the widespread looting and ransacking of Iraq's nuclear facilities may result in terrorists building a radioactive "dirty bomb".
The author looks at the growing threat of cruise missiles, especially given recent tests by North Korea and Iraq, and argues that a sound defense against cruise missiles "depends as much on developing more effective nonproliferation policies as it does on planning for more versatile missile defenses."
Computer viruses, worms, and electronic "pulses" could be doing substantial damage in Iraq, according to some cybersecurity experts.
For the Iraq war, the Pentagon has left two U.S. companies free to sell their images to all comers -- except representatives from countries blacklisted by the State Department.
The war in Iraq has prompted the US military to secure unprecedented access to commercial satellites. It needs to supplement its own substantial satellite data bandwidth to enable full surveillance of Iraq and reliable military communications.