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Pentagon Wants IPv6 by 2008
anzha writes "The constant question for 'when' for IPv6 keeps wandering across good ole /. It seems that the Pentagon has decided to put a foot down and put a deadline on their dark and dangerous portion of the net."
For those not in the know, here is a brief article Explaining the benefits of IPV6.
I'm not Seth.
... and then the rest of the world..
Hate to break it to ya, sonny, but the rest of the world is the reason that the US is finally getting their ball in the game. It ain't America that's hurting because of IPv4, it's China, Japan, Russia, and the world at large: demand for IPv6 in the US is low because Americans have better than 80% of all the IPv4 addresses.
--porsche_lover@hotmail.com
just like the humble blood clot... turboporsche@telus.net
IPv6 addresses are printed in groups of 16 bits in hex, separated by colons. 3ffe:1200:301b:1:a00:20ff:fec0:ffee, for example. Notice that the '1' is really '0001' - leading 0s within a group can be left out. There are more little tricks, but you can go look at the various IPv6 RFCs if you're really curious.
I think this is a good idea. After all, they created the internet, so I'd be inclined to trust the DoD on this. Moreover, the milirary is moving to be a more and more integrated organization. The battlefield is quite rapidly becoming wired, or unwired.
Recently in one of our training excercise out in the California desert, every soldier, truck, helicopter, etc. was connected in a very integrated and dynamic network which allowed the commanding officers to witness the mock battle in real time, seeing which forces were where, and how to adapt to a changing situation extremely quickly.
In military theory, and well in any competitive environment, the goal is to gather information, assess the situation, decide on a course of action, and execute that decision. Whoever can complete this loop or cycle first has the clear advantage. By connecting everyone on the battlefield so that they can gather and pass on information as fast as possible is clearly a necessary step for this to work.
So, if all our soldiers need to be connected to the information infrastructure, it is clear that this will be accomplished with information technology. And how else to do this? Well, over cheap, abundant, and "easy" to configure systems. And what do these systems use as an underlying framework?
IP addressed based systems. (right? im a soldier, not a network architect, so my appologies if i am wrong)
So, from the military's standpoint, it would be a good idea to have as many IP addresses as possible. They will sure need them when there are hundreds of thousands/millions/billions of information nodes dispersed across the battlefield of the not too distant future.
Hrrmm. According to my python console and this page
2^127 / (.51*10^15 m^2 * 1,000,000 mm^2/m^2)
Or, roughly, the number of usable addresses (estimate) divided by the number of square millimeters on the surface of the planet still yields 3.33*10^17 addresses per square millimeter!
Anybody care to check my math?