This is no secret to the US Military. The Department of the Army in the United States, through its Command and General Staff College, has directed all units to maintain specific works in their libraries; The Art of War is specifically mentioned by name as an example of works to be maintained at each individual unit.

But how do you know yourself and your enemy when that enemy is constantly changing? One might wish for the "good old days" of the Cold War, where the Soviet bloc was the primary "enemy" and served as a clear intelligence target and organization nexus for intelligence. Now, the defense intelligence community has had to change its information infrastructure from an emphasis on functional or geopolitical expertise toward needing to rapidly gather, analyze, and disseminate relevant knowledge from a vast quantity of classified and open source information.

It is interesting to draw parallels between this military requirement and the ever-evolving world of business. While one always has in the back of one's head the "Doberman pinscher of the industry" (which generally include one or more of the "Big Four" companies: IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle), today's executive needs to keep track of the hordes of yapping terriers nipping at his heels. Even the "Big Four" are increasingly needing to watch their back for up and coming challenges. Information anxiety is rampant - in this paradox, one can never have enough information, yet one often is deluged with too much information.

In addition, just as in the business world, where the individual knowledge worker is increasingly charged with making independent decisions based on available information, the warfighters and force commanders have a similar imperative. So systems that serve both markets need to be able to scale and adapt to those in the field as well as those in the home office.

It is in these parallels that we find the basis for creating solutions to effectively arm the warfighter with intelligence and to effectively arm the knowledge worker with intelligence are not that different.