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U.S. Military To Create Its Own Internet
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times today reports 'The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future. ... The Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information Grid, or GIG. Conceived six years ago, its first connections were laid six weeks ago. It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build ...' Members of a consortium formed 9/28 include Boeing; Cisco Systems; Factiva (Dow Jones and Reuters); General Dynamics; Hewlett-Packard; Honeywell; I.B.M.; Lockheed Martin; Microsoft; Northrop Grumman; Oracle; Raytheon; and Sun Microsystems."
Who here did not immediately think of skynet when they read this.......
Maybe they could call it Arpanet
I seem to vaguely remember someting familiar from like 30 years back.. called ARPAsometing, with later evolved in the Intersomething..
I thought they already did that with the current web!
"Evil thrives when good men do nothing"
hoorah. i just need to join the army.. :/
I think they just a secure network so that the RIAA can't spy on their stash of Duran Duran.
Is it obvious to anyone else that this will be the system that becomes sentient and takes over the world?
Like the Pentagon could ever control such technology once it gets super-advanced.
We can only pray that the Overlord has more use for as as slaves than as corpses.
You just need one computer on there internet that's connected to one computer on "our" Internet, then it's one network; i.e. the Internet!
Didn't they already do this?
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
This story was posted 30 years ago. ;-)
Sig Nature
I never thought the Pentagon would become a ISP. Would they use Cable or DSL?
42 + 1 = 42
Go ahead Uncle Sam, your net will end up being crappier than the privately funded net, and maybe just maybe then you can just spy on your own employees instead of the rest of us. NAH. In any case, this will end up being an inflexible white elephant with the same type of administration you expect from the DMV. After a few years the govt will realize the public internet is actually superior and more redundant and .mil will magically reappear.
Gopherspace is still available
Well, that explains the quote from Bush's debate:
BUSH: Thanks. I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
they are working with Microsoft...
All that new pr0n, and we can't touch it
Table-ized A.I.
And they honestly don't think it will be the same storry again this time?
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) issued RFI's on this in 2002. In Decembver of 2003, DISA confirmed they'd contracted Juniper, Cisco, Sycamore and Ciena to provide equipment for this network. Total business is about $100 to each of the 4 through 2005. Now wouldn't it have been nice for some oversight on this 2 years ago?
Now we know what Al was talking about.
...I wouldn't want to be that computer when the military decides to read slashdot.
-Pinkoir
So much for it being secure........
They are planning on building their own network. It's no more "Internet" then my home network when it's unplugged from the cablemodem.
Just because you plug two computers together over a WAN link doesn't mean you have an "internet." There's only on Internet, and it's a loosly coupled network of networks.
Gosh, reporters can be so lame.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Ah - it's good to see that America is preparing for future invasions by further beefing up its already horrifyingly powerful Murder Machine. Killing the children of today...tomorrow! U!S!A! U!S!A!
The dont listen SCO anywhere! :-)
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
...and average citizens will start using it, just like we use the Internet and GPS. Then the military will move on to the next big project.
Unlike bombs and bullets, building infrastructure is never wasted.
here
If it takes two decades to build, will it be relevant/secure/useful when completed? Where were we two decades ago? With the ever-evoluting nature of tech, I sure hope they planned ahead...
:
In anyway, it'll sure be costly. From the article
"Providing the connections to run the war net will cost at least $24 billion over the next five years - more than the cost, in today's dollars, of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Beyond that, encrypting data will be a $5 billion project."
That's just the running cost, not the hardware/implementation cost (which may rise up to 200 billions). How many social problems could we cure/relief with that kind of money in the world? I know War = Power, but Kindness = Respect too. Yeah, I live in Canada.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
If you need me, I'll be hacking the GIGson.
This is a logical step considering the military suits they're designed come with a computer built in. A secure network will be required for tracking and communicating with soliders on the battlefield. You obviously wouldn't want them on any public network.
A small side-note: I doubt www content will be a primary usage of the network. Possibly some voice-over-IP applications and a ton of proprietary stuff.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Come out of the office with your routers where we can see them! The GIG is up!
Do you like Japanese imports?
The GIG is up!
In Soviet America, the Internet surfs you!
goatse?
Yes, we already have the arpanet -> Internet.. The article does not have a lot of specifics, but the do mentioned "Internet in the Sky". And, I have seen previous articles talking about satellite to satellite communications. Basically, it's a grid of satellites connected by lasers for high speed communications. It would connect to terrestrial networks, and presumably support communication down to mobile nodes - such as jets and military vehicles.
It's a powerful concept.. military grade ubiquitous networking. Complete communication / synchronization / status / tracking of military forces.
Is it a foregone conclusion that non-stop war is seen as our inevitable futures? And if that is the conventional wisdom, will large corporations (Microsoft, Boeing, et al) then press for wars so that they can sell their wares?
Very saddening. Very bleak futures.
Newsfollow.com
There really are multiple internets.
They should let ARPA oversee the project.
Since it will be some type of a network.. they should call it ARPAnet...
It will cost billions because the idea of a decentralized network is a brand new concept. They may need to tap some nerds at MIT etc. for help.
Imagine a new recruit using GIG, he's exhausted, hungry, and extremely weak from the relentless battle between his company and the enemy stationed a few miles away. The troop needs to infaltrate an enemy complex and obtain precious data.
His objective is to take out the enemy's guard tower to provide an easy path for his comrades, so he pops out his laptop and loads up GIG to download satellite images for an aerial view of the complex. A message pops up, it says 'FREE PLAYSTATION 2!', the unknowing recruit clicks on this malicious message which then comprimises his system and his mission. By this time the enemy has spotted them.
What they haven't addressed is how this great network will be used to better defend the nation or reduce the cost of doing so.
Paul Strassman, a regular columnist for Computerworld, often presents studies of profitability of companies that heavily invest in IT versus those that don't. His studies tend to indicate that comapnies that invest larger percentages of sales tend to have lower profit margins, indicating that perhaps those companies are investing in technology in ways that aren't optimal.
Why should Government be any different? Didn't President Eisenhower warn about the "Defense-Industrial Complex" and the risk of Government buying non-optimal stuff to assist industry profit margins. So why should large-dollar Government-Industry partnerships be any more effiecient than what Paul Strassman sees in the private sector?
The man who said that he created the Internet while in Congress can do this one, can't he? He served in the military, after all (and no Texas ANG dodging; no throwing away of medals either!)
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
but what are the chances of the public taking over when it's built? Many of todays technologies and discoveries were developed by the military with other intentions. I know many things will have changed in the 'decades' it will take to build this.
The idea of being in a rainforest and downloading por on the fly seems amazing.
Come on, it's just their own secure internet, it's not like it's going to be sentient and going to take over the world. ... I don't notice any innuendos... yet...
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
Judging by past experiences, they won't know how to use it even after building it.
Then a terrorist will blow it up.
Then they'll rebuild it, but no one will believe that it works even after it's used, prompting Congressional hearings.
Then Jodie Foster will get passed over for the Oscar.
People seem to love modding me down for pointing out their stupidity and arrogance...
This reminds me of BITNET, an alternate attempt at creating a network. While never using it directly, I remember BITNET protocols being funky, email being handled differently and BITNET mostly just not adapting to new protocols or the internet very well. What started out as an idea to be a new type of network ended up becoming brittle and outdated. Different does not mean better. Good luck, Government, on your defense contractor-driven project where nothing can be changed without a minimum of 18 months of project management and millions of dollars.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
they got the internets! Oh wait
... AOL, after reporting to cut off some of their high speed internet, has reported they have acquired a contract for "lightning speed dialup" for the military.
...would you like to play a game?
From TFA:
...enough to give front-line soldiers bandwidth equal to downloading three feature-length movies a second.
The bandwidth requirements seem bottomless. The military will need 40 or 50 times what it used at the height of the Iraq war last year...
I agree with this statement, but...
Okay, so that's about 100Gb/sec or so? For one, this implies that front-line soldiers can download (with the current data network) one feature length movie every 15 seconds or so (2 Gb/sec), which is absolutely laughable. Maybe 15 hours... (and what format are they talking about anyway?)
Secondly, an individual soldier needs no where near that much information. It's even doubtful that, say, a battalion-level command post would need that much information exchange.
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
I don't understand how no one sees that this is nothing but yet another project designed to sink public money into private pockets. Sort of money laundering of a sort.
Why does the goverment continually include Microsoft in its secure networks?
print 'Hello world!';
http://compbrain.net
Here we go again! *laugh track and wacky music*
...so... how long until this becomes public? Place your bets now!
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
This just sounds like the perfect plan to channel $200 billions of tax payers money into the wallets of numerous contractors.
That's one way of boosting the economy, but a rather f*cked up one if you ask me...
The military just wants their own private pornography collection, like any other sex-starved people would.
The NYT article talked about how soldiers of the future will have a "bird's eye view" of the battlefield in their own HMMWV, although something similar exists today as well. There are a few competing programs in the military right now, such as C2PC, which allow commanders and other soldiers to monitor in real time the location of friendly and enemy units, as well as sorties, terrain, etc. (although the location of enemy units of course isn't 100% accurate). Many many HMMWVs in Iraq right now (I drove a HMMWV in Iraq with this installed) have basic systems installed so that commanders and troops can monitor the same information on a battlefield in real time and coordinate with one another.
I'm sure this new system will be far more advanced and provide much more detailed information than the current one, but don't think that soldiers don't have some of this technology right now either.
Hopefully by the time these 2 decades have passed, the EU and/or China will have become strong enough superpowers to keep the US in check, and we won't have to put up with any more of their senseless wars that don't seem to benefit anyone other than US corporations and the right-wing warhawks they're in league with.
Yes, I know, -1 Flamebait, but I promise you at least 90% of the world is wishing the same thing. Well, maybe not many will be wishing for China as the new global superpower, but personally I'd settle for that if it meant a balance of power. Anything to keep the US from flouting its military might around unchecked.
(rewritten to post AC)
I was getting really impatient for Skynet.
It seems like a complete waste of resources. They would be better off making the current Internet more reliable, faster, efficient, less expensive, and more secure.
When you think about it, it is the unifying nature of the internet that makes it really useful. Slowly but surely, I think that we will see more side nets with a disconnect from the internet happening. In particular, I suspect that the burden of patents will hasten the break-up.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Will give whole new meanings to .com BOOM! AND BUST!
Trust me, in a decade, military types will be calling this thing a clunker government project.
Didn't they do this allready? You know...the original internet...
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
It's logical that they wouldn't want this on the regular internet. Even if they could guarantee the encryption they use is unbreakable, a sufficiently large DDOS attack on the central servers could still wreak havoc on the system.
My concern with the system is when and where authentication would take place. Would it be every time when the "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm" need a single map? This seems like overkill, especially if time is critical. Perhaps once per reboot? Then, if a laptop would be captured or stolen, it could be used to allow an enemy access to the stored spy imagery on the system.
I think that the military/government already has made it's own internet... D/ARPA? It just expanded a little bit more than the military had originally planned. I'm not really sure how this differs from a giant intranet, but maybe I'm just not seeing the big picture.
- dshaw
Skynet is being formed! Oh NOES!!11
I can see this new network is not going to be use much until there are PRONs.
Microsoft is there...
I mean, we all have the right to a backdoor on their net...
how long until
Really? How many wide spectrum (infra red, visual etc) live video feeds from his buddies and their sighting systems would an individual soldier find useful while getting ready to change position under fire?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
They created a new one because they cannot share their mp3's with the current internet.
I don't like the players in this one though. I'd think that the perfect company to build this would have been Data General. They had a B2 secure UNIX and really had it together as far as security went. Unfortunately, IBM probably dismantled all of that when they bought the company.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
....from The Terminator. When does it gain consciousness again? 2024?
What do you mean there won't be "pron" on GIG?
This is the military equivalent of saying "Here's a $200 billion program to Make The World A Better Place". As with so many other military programs, it throws insane quantities of money at a real problem, with a timeline so long that the solutions will be obsolete before they hit the field, without paying attention to recent successes.
The most successful information sources to the troops in the field in Operation Iraqi Freedom were from agencies who left the alphabet soup of military interoperability acronyms behind, and built effective web interfaces (almost on the fly) which were ideal for their customers on the ground in Iraq.
Army logistics tracking system allowed troops to request and track their re-supply orders via satellite phone as if it was FedEx. The smarter intel systems are looking to amazon.com style customer relationship management systems as the appropriate model.
This was all taking place in an environment where laptop computers in the field were still considered "unauthorized" by the military (fortunately, an edict ignored by commanders). Some of the best Command and Control information systems used were improvised in the months before the war by a few smart techies at the Corp level out of necessity using COTS equipment, since none of the divisions in the initial action had been upgraded to trailers-full of "ruggedized" computer systems of the last multi-multi-billion dollar information system program, Force XXI.
The military has to learn to embrace technological FLEXIBLITY and allow a Bazaar-style of advancement among it's agencies. _READ_ some of this GIG proposal... http://ges.dod.mil/articles/netcentric.htm
if you were constrained to those "Common Operating Environment" mandates, and what will be thousands of pages of specifications and acronyms, you'd never want to develop a line of code again. And noone will, except for the half dozen programmers at over-priced defense contractors who will be well paid to live and breath these standards for the next 20 years.
-bcg
You're all whining about how they should use the existing internet. This military thing is NOT going to be an internet. The correct word is "network". what, do you expect them to exchance secret battle plans over public internet router that anyone, without too much hassle, can view? This military netwrok is for military communication, not Slashdot posts and World of Warcraft.
is out of date. The military tend to alter the landscape as it goes along. I think an up to date minefield map would be useful.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Members of a consortium formed 9/28 include Boeing; Cisco Systems; Factiva (Dow Jones and Reuters); General Dynamics; Hewlett-Packard; Honeywell; I.B.M.; Lockheed Martin; Microsoft; Northrop Grumman; Oracle; Raytheon; and Sun Microsystems."
Because Microsoft are the guys you want to talk to when building a totally secure military network...
Alphanos
Because they are both clowns or because they are both symbols of US corporations?
Google has gone Evil, I suppose.
If he can take the initiative to create one Internet... why not two? What better person to hire too, he's done it once before! Maybe this new Internet will have better protocols
It's called Orion (well Raytheon's part are).
I have walked through their security systems by connecting to IIS (on NT4) running on a remote site and examined exchange (5.5) mailboxes containing classified communications due to one of the numerous URL parsing bugs in IIS4. This was a few years back so it's probably better now.
Be very afraid - these guys don't know how to keep a secret safe. They get given a large manual and after that they're a sysadmin.
You aint seen me! right!
Sure, the first iteration will be great. Then the funding will be curtailed to a "maintainence" level Like the government approved and regulated GSM standard in Europe? How's your cellphone network coming along, by the way?
Most applications nowadays are web apps in the military. Partially it was a rush to keep up to date. Since most work ends up being done by contractors, the military can't stay very far behind any longer, and expect to have contractor coders. Another reason was a desire to link into mandated centralized authentication mechanisms. So, a lot of the traffic is web traffic, it's just 443 rather than 80. There are relatively few http sites, since the regs call for any site that implements authentication of any sort to use SSL.
The GIG is basically a name. Not much is really changing about the military networks - the borders are having even more defense added, but they were already pretty heavily defended. The interconnects are being sped up, but once again, they were pretty fast already, what i've seen is incremental improvements. IPV6 compatible hardware is being substituted for that which isn't. A really aggressive date for total conversion (2006) is out there. I'm sure some satellites are going to be lofted to provide overseas connectivity, since the govt is leasing private satellite bandwidth to provide overseas connectivity due to the previously noted problems with existing links.
Probably the biggest change is that strict accountability up and down the line is being organized, so that if someone runs a rogue host that is not compliant with relevant regulations and standards, the system is shut down, either by contacting the owning organization to do so or having the next higher organization in the hierarchy shut them down. In the past, there was probably a resistance to just pulling the cable on people - no longer.
To be honest, this is probably my last post on the topic here. I'm tired of educating anti-American jerks. They can just keep on mouthing off all by themselves while knowing nothing. This whole article and the posters therein have been the biggest bucket of idiots I have heard from in a long time. Nothing personal to the parent poster - that's why I replied to you rather than one of them.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Did the EU build and fund the GSM network? No, they just sold the licenses. The network described here is funded by the govt and contracted via govt procedures. Look for $10,000 ethernet cables attached to the bills for this project.
It's probably akin to what you can achieve with only bricks and mortar. If you want to go to the next level, you have to go with new materials and new building techniques. If they want to use technology as an important battle force, they probably need the rethink most of their current comm building blocks. What they are envisioning is probably going to be way more than a database of all the maps and building blueprints existing. What I mean is that it's probably going to be something more than just support material for aiding during combat.
Maybe this will spur new technologies in the same way the original ARPANet did and have vast ramifications into our lives 10 or 20 years down the road.
This will turn into another pork project that pays out nicely in round one than is forgotten, underfunded, and administered by DMV rejects.
On a side note, the DISA site I work at has seen no long term planning schedules for this GIG network. My guess is it will lose steam long before it becomes its own 'Internet'.
I didn't know RCA was involved in military networks!
The Corps battle cry / official noise is "OO-RAH", while the Army one is "HUAA".
Really good network technology already exists, and the military simply can not out compete the market.
Keeping the Internet working is already a national security concern anyhow, and it would be allot more cost effective to beef up, and add real security and redundancy to what is already out there than to start from scratch.
Other things like encrypted sattelite data, could be distributed allot more effetcively and redundantly with a good p2p network than than zillion bits of bandwidth.
That GWB is just doing what the people who voted for him want?Well, 50% of the people who bothered to vote seem to think he was doing a good job, so... yeah, I think he is.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Where's Al Gore in that list? After all, he did invent the first internet, he could give some useful tips and what not.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
If this doesn't sound familiar, then you've forgotten a little bit of Internet history. Our current Internet started as ARPAnet, an effort between the government, universities. What happened since then?? I think it's safe to say that business people/marketers made sure a damn useful resource went down the toilet. Weak software and too many bums on this Internet have made the government smarten up that they need their own network for reliability sake.
perhaps we need an X prise for it to bring the price down and get it done now???
I'm a tax payer..... I don't approve of such a spending of money, expeciall considering such money and effort could be better spent on What the World Really Wants and as such reduce the need for anti-terrorism terrorism.....
People do things for reasons, even if they have to borrow or take the reason from others like this one for 9/11"... so lets instead simply remove the reasons and excuses that only support such terrorism groups to grow...
So yeah, 20 years and hundreds of billions of taxpayers dollars can most certainly be better spent...than building a government owned and controlled private internet payed for by those not allowed to use it...
seems like they need better software and remote equipment. not $24 billion for fiber links. the article mentions that $24 billion is more than the manhattan project, ajusted for inflation.
the military is claiming that it lost its world-wide technological superiority when the Internet caught on internationally, 1996-ish. to make up for this loss they want to buy a faster private network with more bandwidth "enough to give front-line soldiers bandwidth equal to downloading three feature-length movies a second." to start this, they will spend $24 billion dollars to build "new net connections" which seem to be fiber connects (this doesn't include the satellite connects).
sounds like an enormous government handout to me.
[The Pentagon's] Worldwide Military Command and Control System, built in the 1960's, often failed in crises. A $25 billion successor, Milstar, was completed in 2003 after two decades of work. Pentagon officials say it is already outdated: more switchboard than server, more dial-up than broadband, it cannot support 21st-century technology.
so why not just lease fiber and build the system gradually? then you don't have to worry that in 20 years you will be stuck with an obselete network.
they talk about military intelligence a lot, like this thing is going to deliver to our troops tons of intelligence in amazing ways. first, i'm doubtful that we have enough intelligence to utilize all this fiber bandwidth. second, most of the intelligence should probably be cached close to the satellite connection. the real weak link in millitary IT infrastructure is in links with the troops and software/hardware/human interfaces.
fear is the mind killer
The Internet, you know this global TCP/IP network, is made up of several networks. Some of those networks are also internets. (Interconnected internetworks).
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
What is the sense in this? One extrapolation is the Skynet model. Of course, it wouldn't become sentient and send T-1000's out to kill Kill KILL!!! But it could become a dangerous tool of global nuclear terror in the hands of a neocon admin gone mad with power (stipulating that the present regime isn't...yet...).
On the other hand, the really scary deal is the 9/11 example, where massive destruction is done with $30 worth of box cutters and a score of fanatic assholes. In which case, such an expenditure (like the anti-missile defence nonsense) becomes something very much like the Maginot Line.
Only time will tell, but my personal preference would be for the US to abandon its Global Empire for a more sustainable and attainable role as a regional power similar to Orwell's Oceania, only without Big Brother fascism and oppression.
If the USA went that way (which I believe it will, just out of economic necessity) it wouldn't have to spend over time untold and useless trillions on defence and defence related items, like this Maginot Skynet deal.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The government had its own military classified internet years ago. What's different about this one?
Of course, since they want to keep it protected, they'll need to use internally created pr0n sites.
"Cadet Winters, nice rack, report to the base photographer at 0800! Thats an order!"
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Hmmm... I wonder if they're thinking along the lines of my own Swedish military, constructing their own intranet whose only link to the public is a mail-server.
Let's just hope they spend enough money on a fast hardware-crypto, so U.S. troops in the middle east aren't stuck with 120,000 men sharing 1Mbit of secure bandwidth ^_^
It's a great thing, not being connected to the internet, and having firewalls (FreeBSD-based) all over the place. Especially when doing tech support, since this means we have no viruses on FMIP, despite the fact that Windows clients are used.
A note about the firewall... It's creators believed a slimmed-down OS would be the most secure, so the kernel is slimmed and unused applications gone. Also, I don't know why they didn't choose OpenBSD instead of free, but then again, this was 1997... *Sigh*
Conceived six years ago, its first connections were laid six weeks ago. It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build
Uhmm, Congress... Seriously, cut this out. Do you think that any business could ever operate this way? What do you plan on doing with a hundred billion dollar WIRED network in TWENTY YEARS. You have way better things to do with your money than this.
Please, stop. Send us to Mars. Do something that we'll get something out of.
Yeah, and once they've appropriated all the decent backbones due to "national security", there won't be a problem with people being overly informed.
Also, that pesky filesharing problem they were having will seem to just disappear...
-----------------------
You are what you think.
Don't ascribe the incompetence of one person to an entire military! We have the best, strongest military in the world!
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Certainly explains the "Ask Slashdot" story below this one on the front page, eh?
Buy the President
6 hours later a 14 year old in starbucks hacks it, post it, and the next day you can google it.
They are spending "hundreds of billions of dollars" on something that is gunna be brought down by some pimple faced 16 year old with a dell running Windows ME within 3 years! way to go pentagon!!! waste more $$ that could go to our damn busted economy
GIGgle?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
when they have it installed on planes or satellites/space stations, it will be called "The great GIG in the Sky!"
Funny how the conservatives call a mother living off welfare for $300 a month irresponsable while we spend billions of dollars which we dont have due to our deficit to applease lobbiests from the tech industry.
How much labor will go to India anyway not trickle back to the US economy on our tax dollars?
http://saveie6.com/
As long as us taxpayers have full access to it as well.
This just looks like another case of using US taxpayer money to fund US high-tech industries/corporations. I mean, the US government can't say "Hey, let's just hand over $24 billion to these high-tech corporations". People won't accept that, but they can say "The military needs $24 billion to build a new superduper network thingy to fight terrorists or whatever". People won't blink an eyelid at that: "That stuff sounds complicated! What would we know!".
Either way the money goes to the same place. Whether the military gets a new network or not is irrelevant. The corporations get to use the money to fund their R&D (or line their pockets) safe in the knowledge that a regular "welfare" cheque will be coming in from the US government. Any inventions/products can then be brought onto the so-called 'free' market. Except this time everything will be properly patented, trade-secret-ed or whatever, unlike Internet version 1.
--
Simon
They might have well said "Military Industrial Complex to have its own internet".
Ike was never so right. To see an American president warn against the concentration of power in the military's and their contractors hands is in hindsight, unbelievable. He really saw, very early on, that things were slipping out of the hands of democracy and into plutocracy, that has now commenced its descent into lootocracy.
The "consortium" reads like a laundry list of players that have been gouging Americans for money and young lives to finance their corrupt extragovernment.
The other thing the military doesn't do is security. They think you make your systems secure by classifying the source code. It's always a race to the bottom to find which is worse, system reliability or system security. This doesn't bode well for an attempt to build a HUGE secure, reliable network.
My prediction: they'll burn through tens of billions of dollars, chew up the careers of a large number of programmers and managers, and the whole idea will fade away around 2010 or so. One good thing; the coding cannot possibly be outsourced.
Wow...their own network.... millions and billion spent to do exactly what a 12 year old could do with one trip to CompUSA. ..but this now gives us the answer to what Bush was referring to when he said 'internets' during the debates.
www.sorryeverybody.com
-Cnik
for all that guantanamo bay bondage porn.
Actually the just have better porn and don't want to share it with us "civilians".
Anyone who thinks the military is as cool and ultramodern as on tv and the movies is an idiot. Let me put it in a more proper persective for you.
Palm/retnal scanners...nope...a hahahahahahahahahaha...tears.... Let's put it this way I got an email the other day asking me whether or not I had submitted my paperwork to have the email account I've been using for the last 5 years.
Ultra fast internet connections, nope.
Top of the line computers...sure....from 1998. Fiber optic networks...nope...coax and 10bT baby!
Instant file recovery and easy to use multi department integrated data basses...in your dreams buddy.
Super geek wunderman IT guys that maintain and protect our networks....hahahahahahahahahahhahaha..tears..hah
Neeto torpeedo technical orders with revolving 3D diagrams of equipment and buildings with intergrated sensors that can be controlled remotely on a really cool laptop/palmtop....err no. Bust out the TO books and get a wagon...yes I said a wagon we use them to carry tools and the 30lbs of books we need to do our work.
Sealed room containing an alien body...that one is true...well ok to be honest it's made out of rubber but it is in a SAR access only area... is that good enough?
An all powerfull multi-branch force combining sentient software/hardware matrix that will destroy the world by taking over all the weapons in the military. No but I do have to run Adaware everday to clean off all the crap from people surfing the net and playing flash games on government computers to keep it from crashing when I check my email. Not quite as scary as Skynet, but it does annoy the piss out of me.
Think global, act loco
Actually, that makes me realize something. The military had an Internet, and then we made our own. With blackjack and hookers.
Jerry Pournelle gets in trouble for bragging that he has access...
s t. html
http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/li
(ok, I have nothing else to say, but I have to meet the chaacter limit. I already made my point in the subject).
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
not THE Internet?
What a great way to funnel all that Internet infrastructure investment into a system useful only for destroying capital, rather than building it. Making the public Internet stronger and building advanced cryptography and protocol architectures to secure organization command/control/communications data doesn't make America stronger - reinventing the wheel with trillions of Pentagon tax dollars makes us stronger!
--
make install -not war
Not sure what was more amazing, the story or the reactions I've read. Some of you seem to get the joke, but most of you are clueless. The DoD has had it's own isolated networks (yes, several, and they are actually isolated and independent from the W3) for a long time. The GIG is old news. DoD is refining updating it and will go on refining it and may even call it something different in the future. The new consortia (Net-Centric Operations Industry Consortium - NCOIC) is still trying to figure out it's own charter and mandate. It's all based on big money and it costs lots to join. There's a foundation (Net-Centric Operations Industry Foundation - NCOIF) that predates it and it has within it the Association For Enterprise Integration (AFEI - www.afei.org). This one is trying to be all inclusive (low cost of membership and all sizes of companies welcome. More the open model even if some of the same bigger players are involved in both. There's lots of this sort of stuff going on and it's been going on for a long time. I will conceed that many of the important DoD web sites that used to be visible are now protected and restricted access, but there's still lot of information in the public domain... if you're looking. Something you might be more concerned about is the waste of time and effort as different parts of the DoD try to protect their rice bowls. They are not all on the same page, and it's going to continue to cost more than it should for the functionality that gets deployed. I guess that's not a new story either... ;-)
If I remember right they already did this. And we are now using it's predisesor.
This is a step toward the pinnacle of managing an army. Eventually part of the pentagon will be converted to 24/7 "Lan-Party" where commanders will come in and sit at a computer, select their troops with a mouse, and click a spot on a bird's eye view on the terrain at which point the soldiers will hear in their helmets "proceed to coordinates blah blah..." Of course it is up to the soldiers to say something cheesy in response like "fire it up", "I long for combat", or "My life for Aui.. I mean Earth"
There won't won't be much microsoft involved in this. DoD is quickly becoming a pure J2EE shop. Trust me.
I hate the fact that the US Governement is trying to spy on everyone. Now they wont to be able to do it more efficently? Anyone who supports this is an idiot.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
11/13/2004
Chuck Herrin, CISSP, CISA, MCSE, CEH
Author's Note - For anyone who is curious, I have put together this shortened document that will show you exactly how easy it is to break into Diebold's GEMS software, which is the software used to tabulate regional voting results. This software runs on regular Windows machines and counts the votes from multiple precincts that may have used touch screens (which have their own problems), optically scanned punch cards, or other balloting methods. It is responsible for the accurate reporting of tens of millions of votes cast using many different types of ballots.
That's right - even if you used the older systems like punch cards, your vote can still be Hacked when the numbers all come together. Wanna see how easy it is?
I am going to show you, step by step and with screenshots, how an attack against our election system could very easily steal a Statewide or even a National election without leaving a trace. This attack would be easy to carry out, difficult to detect, and exert enormous influence on the results, leaving the humble voter coldly left out of the decision-making process.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is just so later on, when everything migrates to GIG, Bush will be able to say that he, instead of Al Gore, 'invented' the Internet.
George W. was still jealous from the last election because Al Gore invented the last Internet, so he wanted one he could call his own.
New system hacked:
all U base R belong 2 us - literally!
from the heart...
Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
chown -R you ~/base
Actually the roots of the term Hooah are unknown. There has been speculation that the term Hooah originated in WWII, When troops were told about particularly dangerous missions and they would reply with "Who, us?" As far as an actually definition, http://www.amc.army.mil/amc/rda/rda-ap/hooah.html does a good job defining it, it means alot more than Heard, Understood, and Acknowledged.
There was another term that instantly sprung into my mind:
;)
pork barrel
Nothing else, sorry. They don't get VPNs with insane key sizes and military strength cryptography over commodity hardware, they will get their own fiber lines, different equipment, different signalling, different anything. Made up to mil spec. Just like the ARPANET. But different. And expensive.
Of course this network will still be heavily encrypted, because no one knows who will be wiretapping somewhere, but different nonetheless. Did I mention expensive?
Didn't we do this already? Called it something like...DARPANET?
I'm not suprised that microsoft is in on it.
http://www.macinhack.com
Let them prove they know how to be secure by cleaning up their 27% of the Internet where 99.999% of all the viruses play.
Then let them be apart of this 'secure' network.
I was a contractor and worked on the NMCI contract, which is the navy marine corp intranet. Seeing how this project was run, I would be pretty worried about how well the system acctually works. The goverment has not gotten a good value for the money with NMCI.
The original article that I read about this stated the new network was to be WIRELESS. Nowhere in NYT's article did I see this mentioned. This newspaper has proven its not even worth the paper to wipe my a$$ with!
~me
Instead of redoing the ailing national power grid that would bring in many more jobs than this hidden gem--intelligent I know but not for general use nor for improving the ailing economy.
Is it just me or does The Pentagon think it has a blank check on all matters? Before anyone notes that there will be jobs done may I remind everyone this doesn't improve our security, for the general public. It makes sure that the Government can spy on its citizens more securely.
Too bad so many idiots voted for the Dems and Reps instead of The LP that wants to scale back government to its original intent and coordinate with the private sector to reinvigorate this pathetic economy.
Would we want to build a canal system to protect against floods and drought in the Midwest? Nope! We'll just charge more to the public and keep racking up a debt that will always accrue since Nature will always flood and bring droughts to the Midwest.
Do we want to invest in high-speed cargo railsystems to reduce heavy machinery on highways and make the transportations of products more efficient? Nope! We would rather offer funds to revamp the highest maintenance approach to highway restoration.
Do we want to build consumer commuter lightrails to reduce wasted congestion and traffic? Nope! We'd rather build a top secret Internet called GIG!!
Can people finally acknowledge they are complete door knobs and don't realize they aren't getting shit for a return on their investment via their vote?
From the article:
[T]he Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future.
The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats - "a God's-eye view" of battle.
This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery" from a spy satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds."
I'm picturing something like...
Son-of-General (sitting in front of dead computer): `Aw crap, now how am I gonna play Age of Wonderous Dominions 2015 Extreme? I know! Dad!'
General (sitting in his study using a computer hooked into GiG): `What son?'
SoG: `I can't play my computer games dad? Can I use your computer?'
G: `I keep telling you son, this is a tool, not a toy. You can't play those games on here.'
SoG: `PleaseDadpleaseDadpleaseDadpleaseDad!'
G: `Of'er crying... Alright.'
SoG: `Thanks Dad!'
[Meanwhile out in the battlefield during a relatively quiet period...]
Sargeant: `Er, men, we've got new orders. It seems we have to,' (reads palmtop), `act like romans and attack the rampaging goth hordes. And Jackson,'
Jackson: `Sah!'
S (still reading palmtop): `Go shoot that tree.'
J: `Sah!' {blamblamblam}
His name is Robert Paulsen...
Yay.
Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation's biggest military contractor, said he envisioned a "highly secure Internet in which military and intelligence activities are fused," shaping 21st-century warfare in the way that nuclear weapons shaped the cold war.
Every member of the military would have "a picture of the battle space, a God's-eye view," he said. "And that's real power."
Man this Robert J. Stevens is one twisted puppy.
I suppose in his world God is on his side, and the killing of others is all O.K. as long as they are infidels, civilians and combatants alike.
Crusaders... start your engines.
Sig em Duke !
I for one welcome...actually, no. No I don't.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
True, and with all of those big dumb companies on the list, especially M$, you can expect the same old M$ on the desktop and the same old nightmare on the network. The thing will quickly be filled with all the worms and bot nets that infect the public network the rest of us use. Indeed, because most of those companies are slow, dumb and targeted by worm makers as repositories for reinfection, we can imagine that this big dumb network will will serve to infect the rest of us who are quickly moving away from that kind of thing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'll take my cozy Suburban over your hippie train any day of the week.
Quotith the article "enough to give front-line soldiers bandwidth equal to downloading three feature-length movies a second."
Whatever.. Whats its upload like? Eh.
The problem with ANY government project is that it's done by government contractors -- who don't really have a stake in the project's ultimate success or efficiency. Has anyone here ever eaten at a civilian-run military "dining facility"? They are horrible. The civilians have no stake in providing a good product, people get "fed", they get paid. Go to a military-run DFAC and you'll have decent food because they have an interest in their fellow servicemembers' food not sucking.
Government contracting needs serious reform, but no one wants to do it because the government and big business are having one giant sex party.
$5 billion for setting up encryption? The military's done some good things with adapting to an environment where off-the-shelf merchandise often can fill certain military needs. What's wrong with IPsec using AES? And is a worldwide private network REALLY neccessary or is it just another way for the Republicans to pay off their wealthy contractor friends? The project itself is ludicrous and unneccessary. It could be done a lot cheaper on private, secure VPNs on the Internet.
We have enough issues as it is. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, troops resorted to using their embedded journalist's satellite phones because their communication systems failed. How about we work on something like better strategic planning for theater-wide communication systems THAT WORK.
History repeats itself...does that mean shag carpet and leisure suits are coming back too?
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
They are going to build Otherland and live forever!
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Agreed. Arpanet had a good idea, but I'm not sure the military can compete with a global marketplace in terms of updating it's private network to match the Internet.
Unless, of course, greedy corporations continue to manipulate the net into becoming a top-down aymmetric service for consumers, rather than a true network.
And they would have long ago had such a network, using nothing but opens source apps, and costing tax payers little... But we can't have that now can we?
"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." Albert Einstein
S.S. Alert.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Don't fight harder, fight smarter. Good concept. But bandwidth equivalent to 3 full-length movies per second to soldiers on the front line? Unless we plan to fly a cloud of satellites focused on every point on the planet, I don't see that happening any time soon. Rather than a God's eye view, maybe the Pentagon should aim to perfect the bird's or airship's eye view for now.