A central player in the DoD’s organizational approach to communications is the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). Today, DISA manages the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN)—a communications network serving as the core connectivity between the various networks of the military services and defense agencies, operating around the world and across the internet with data storage systems, satellite communications, and other advanced data transport capabilities. In addition, DISA plays a critical role in providing security for a wide range of the DoD’s computer systems. This CSIS report begins with a discussion of the rapidly evolving environment in which DISA is operating in order to provide context for understanding DISA’s operations, DISA’s recent changes, and the ways in which DISA’s mission is likely to be transformed in the coming years, with a focus on areas that will require careful management by DISA and DoD leadership. It then examines contract data from DISA and related agencies to illustrate how these changes have manifested in DISA’s spending and its organizational and operational approach. It concludes with a discussion of the choices confronting policymakers who are considering decisions on DISA’s future.

This CSIS report explores the important choices that the Department of Defense has to make about the future mission and organization of the Defense Information Systems Agency--the organization created in the Cold War to unify its top-level communications--as it adapts to the challenges of a changing world.

From the Foreword: "This book lays out much of what we’ve learned at AT&T about SDN and NFV. Some of the smartest network experts in the industry have drawn a map to help you navigate this journey. Their goal isn’t to predict the future but to help you design and build a network that will be ready for whatever that future holds. Because if there’s one thing the last decade has taught us, it’s that network demand will always exceed expectations. This book will help you get ready." —Randall Stephenson, Chairman, CEO, and President of AT&T "Software is changing the world, and networks too. In this in-depth book, AT&T's top networking experts discuss how they're moving software-defined networking from concept to practice, and why it's a business imperative to do this rapidly." —Urs Hölzle, SVP Cloud Infrastructure, Google "Telecom operators face a continuous challenge for more agility to serve their customers with a better customer experience and a lower cost. This book is a very inspiring and vivid testimony of the huge transformation this means, not only for the networks but for the entire companies, and how AT&T is leading it. It provides a lot of very deep insights about the technical challenges telecom engineers are facing today. Beyond AT&T, I’m sure this book will be extremely helpful to the whole industry." —Alain Maloberti, Group Chief Network Officer, Orange Labs Networks "This new book should be read by any organization faced with a future driven by a "shift to software." It is a holistic view of how AT&T has transformed its core infrastructure from hardware based to largely software based to lower costs and speed innovation. To do so, AT&T had to redefine their technology supply chain, retrain their workforce, and move toward open source user-driven innovation; all while managing one of the biggest networks in the world. It is an amazing feat that will put AT&T in a leading position for years to come." —Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation This book is based on the lessons learned from AT&T’s software transformation journey starting in 2012 when rampant traffic growth necessitated a change in network architecture and design. Using new technologies such as NFV, SDN, Cloud, and Big Data, AT&T’s engineers outlined and implemented a radical network transformation program that dramatically reduced capital and operating expenditures. This book describes the transformation in substantial detail. The subject matter is of great interest to telecom professionals worldwide, as well as academic researchers looking to apply the latest techniques in computer science to solving telecom’s big problems around scalability, resilience, and survivability.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the way organizations communicate, collaborate, and coordinate everyday business and industrial processes. Adoption of IoT technologies has proven beneficial to organizations that manage large numbers of assets and coordinate complex and distributed processes. Decades ago, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) pioneered the sensor, computer networking, and communications technology that serve as the foundation of IoT, but today the U.S. military is struggling to equip its workforce with the basic functions provided by commercial smartphones. DoD continues to drive innovation in advanced sensors and control systems, but it is falling behind in deployment of IoT technologies that have the potential to deliver new capabilities and cost savings. Based on in-depth research and interviews with 29 government and industry executives and subject matter experts, this report suggests ways in which the U.S. military could better leverage IoT technologies to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Leveraging the Private Sector offers the first sustained analysis of public and private sector initiatives designed to encourage firms and industries to use their own management expertise to improve their environmental performance. Cary Coglianese and Jennifer Nash bring together original empirical studies by the nation?s leading experts on recent public and private sector experiments. Do management-based strategies lead to improved environmental outcomes? What kinds of strategies hold the most promise? Leveraging the Private Sector addresses these questions through studies of state pollution prevention planning laws, private sector purchasing requirements, and federal risk management regulations, among others. The contributors show that efforts to leverage private sector experience and knowledge can have a distinctive contribution in the future of environmental protection. Ultimately, a firm's broader management practices shape its environmental performance. Public and private sector strategies that seek to influence these practices directly can help bring about further environmental improvements. This book breaks new ground by investigating a new and promising approach for advancing the economy and the environment.

Networks have been described in terms of metaphors, governance arrangements and structural or institutional arrangements. These different perspectives of networks come out of a variety of disciplines, including political science, public administration, urban affairs, social welfare, public management and organizational/sociological research. This wealth of research, while contributing to a deeper understanding of networks, presents a dilemma which is addressed by this book. That is the question of whether there is a theory of public networks that informs networks in their various forms, and is there a need for a new theory of networks? More importantly, is network research still relevant to practice? Does network theory improve the process of governance? Are different terms and/or approaches actually the same or different? What do these different approaches mean to theory? This book deeply explores and integrates existing network theory and related theories from a number of perspectives, levels and jurisdictions to develop a framework to guide network design, governance and management. The book focuses on the important issue of network performance, looking at networks as bounded and consciously arranged; the actors who participate in them design the relationships among a bounded set of individual organizations to purse common objectives. Finally, the chapters tease out the variety of governance modes or regimes that intersect with network governance. This book offers a comprehensive, integrative, interdisciplinary approach that enables specialists, practitioners and administrators across a wide array of interests and fields to formulate and work on problems using a common language, analytical framework and theoretical basis.

There are currently real pressures on U.S. ground forces to define their contingency future. For example, there is a perceived decline in plausible conventional warfighting scenarios, and many see maintaining large standing ground capabilities solely as a hedge against uncertainty as cost-prohibitive in an era of declining resources. As U.S. officials will undoubtedly want to consider the widest possible range of military options in the event of future crises, this study endeavors to identify ground force options that are most important to the security of core U.S. interests in two key regions of the world: the Middle East and South Asia; and the Asia Pacific. It is meant to help the Department of Defense define future challenges risk as it relates to ground forces and identify and classify specific qualitative risks that could undermine future operational success. While the study focuses on U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) and U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM), its findings are likely relevant worldwide.

The three-volume set LNCS 6675, 6676 and 6677 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Neural Networks, ISNN 2011, held in Guilin, China, in May/June 2011. The total of 215 papers presented in all three volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 651 submissions. The contributions are structured in topical sections on computational neuroscience and cognitive science; neurodynamics and complex systems; stability and convergence analysis; neural network models; supervised learning and unsupervised learning; kernel methods and support vector machines; mixture models and clustering; visual perception and pattern recognition; motion, tracking and object recognition; natural scene analysis and speech recognition; neuromorphic hardware, fuzzy neural networks and robotics; multi-agent systems and adaptive dynamic programming; reinforcement learning and decision making; action and motor control; adaptive and hybrid intelligent systems; neuroinformatics and bioinformatics; information retrieval; data mining and knowledge discovery; and natural language processing.