Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
I always thought hooah was the New England word for prostitute.
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
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... ;-)