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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."
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!
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
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...
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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.
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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
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?
Although it's funny to say that this is just a rehashing of the creation of DARPA net again, it's going to be more than that.
The US military has seen what their creation has turned into with the internet and now they want to be able to leverage that for their own use. But at the same time they have seen how a robust system like the internet can still be overwhelmed by DOS attacks and worms/viri. In order to have a system that they can be sure will not be compromized when they need it most, they are forced to create a seperate system.
However even with trying to create a completely seperate network they will run into problems. Satallites could be shot down. Microwave links could be jammed. Encryption could be broken and misinformation could be injected to the network.
Given the current state of incompetence in the armed forces, I can assure you that this project will be late and over budget, and will not accomplish all the things they want it to.
Oh well, that seems to be the status quo in the US.
Then they can safely shutdown "our" Internet. No more discovering stolen elections, or Fallujah casualties in the U.S.S.A.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
I was getting really impatient for Skynet.
Incompetence? Ok I admit a lot of things are over budget, but please find us a military anywhere in the world that can accomplish half of what we can. Now I admit, we don't go throwing around the threat of nukes as much as some countries and that does leave us at a disadvantage.
Any military success we have is by brute force and a whole lot of money.
Pretty much all military success by brute force and a whole lot of money.
I can guarantee you, though, that if the 1944-era US military had to take Falluja, the city would be rubble, and all of the civillians would be dead or refugees.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
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Simon
But he is the Commander in Chief, and is briefed on everything that might be relevant to the country, it's economy, and it's security. Seeing as he's probably not one to have used "The Internet" much, he may not have realized (in the split second that he uttered it) how silly "internets" sounds to the common person.
:)
So probably about as silly as "it is economy, and it is security" sounds to the common person?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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 !