GNEC, NCS power Army's global network

Editor’s Note: The evolution of C4ISR initiatives was affected by a variety of decisions this year. At the same time, efforts to improve upon the technologies that support the warfighter, including command, control, communications and computers and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems, gained new urgency.

Defense Systems asked a number of senior military officers and Pentagon personnel to answer the question: What was the most important C4ISR development of the past year and why as part of a broader year-end assessment on C4ISR developments. Following is the response from Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, Army chief information officer.

“The two most important C4ISR developments from an Army perspective were funding of the Global Network Enterprise Construct (GNEC) "6+1" toolset — to improve the overall security of the network — and the Operational Validation of the Network Service Center concept in support of GNEC."

The GNEC "effort will standardize the way the Army views the status of systems on our network and affords us the ability to control those systems from a central location. Given the speed by which threat vulnerabilities challenge our network, we must now operate at the speed of light to deter threats against our network from anywhere on the globe. The use of standardized toolsets and a consolidated active directory for applications and e-mail will now provide the Army with the requisite resources to adequately operate and defend the Army network on a global scale."

In the NSC Operational Validation, "an Army unit for the first time was able to virtually deploy from home station into a theater of operation, rather than having to deploy their physical network systems via ship or air. While the [Operational Validation] required significant personnel resources and technical expertise to execute, the concept for GNEC was validated."

“Operational, technical and training lessons learned will now be addressed to improve performance during [Operational Validation] II in May 2010.”