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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."
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No, actually it is "hooah" in the Army. It was originally short for "Heard, Understood and Acknowledged."
If life is a waste of time and time is a waste of life, let's all get wasted and have the time of our lives.
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... ;-)