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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
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!
This story was posted 30 years ago. ;-)
Sig Nature
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
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?
I don't think we have anything to worry from the Pentagon's newly aware computer system. I mean, all it's going to do is adopt the bureaucratic mindset. All it's going to worry about is what defnse contractor it's going to work for after retirement.
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.
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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?
Easy there killer. It's hooah, not hoorah.
:-(
We National Guardsmen try to use that "word" as little as possible. It has that annoying habbit of reminding us that we're not civilians anymore.
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?
At least that's how I see it.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
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.
Anybody been paying attention to the mind machine interface? From computer chips that can connect to nerves to allowing quadrapalegics to use computers via electrodes in their brains the advancement of the mind machine interface seems to be advancing at a solid clip. As compared to the stagnation of AI research over the last four decades (especially in regards to a true intelligence as opposed to solving complicated math problems like chess) there is a significant gap. I think that by the time a real AI gets out into the internet and tries to wreak havoc it'll have to deal with a ton of bio-mechanical human intelligences on their home turf. Just my two cents.
00010111 always try everything twice
Just so long it doesn't take over Cheyenne Mountain and Rosie O'Donnell!
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
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.
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 always thought hooah was the New England word for prostitute.
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.
Yeah, I thought they were called NIPRNet and SIPRNet.
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
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.
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.
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... ;-)
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..."
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?
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 !