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."

Comments

$24 billion for fiber lines?

[gotih]

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 Pentagon officials say it is already outdated: more switchboard than server, more dial-up than broadband, it cannot support 21st-century technology.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.