Lockheed Snags $31 Million To Reinvent the Internet, Microsoft To Help

DARPA has awarded a $31 million contract to megacorp Lockheed Martin which will, with some assistance from Microsoft, attempt to reinvent the Internet and make it more military-friendly. "The main thrust of the effort will be to develop a new Military Network Protocol, which will differ from old hat such as TCP/IP in that it will offer 'improved security, dynamic bandwidth allocation, and policy-based prioritization levels at the individual and unit level.' Lockheed will be partnered with Anagran, Juniper Networks, LGS Innovations, Stanford University and — of course — Microsoft in developing the MNP. Apart from that, Lockheed's own Information Systems & Global Services-Defense tentacle will work on amazing new hardware."

Comments

Could be a good them for them and us

[mangastudent]

This makes a lot of sense, the military has unique requirements of all sorts, from security to e.g. their inability to hook up an aircraft carrier to fiber (except while at dock) to their need to carry both operational and personal traffic (the latter to keep their people in touch with home) over necessarily constrained links.

I like the bit about "self configuration capabilities to ... reduce the need for trained network personnel and lower overall life cycle costs for network management". While the current state of the art keeps us well employed, things could be easier. Heck, the more the systems I maintain for my parent self-configure, the happier I am.

Yikes. I work for Lockheed...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and I can tell you that this sounds like a disaster in the making. LM is so top-heavy with bureaucracy and process-bloat that the company might as well be a mini-Pentagon itself (not so mini, either, now that I think about it). Nothing happens quickly at Lock-Mart, and the things that do happen cost a bloody blue fortune.

If nothing else, they'd better hire in some outside IT guys. If this work gets anywhere near the corporate IT bozos, the military can look forward to a future of XP Pro with daily forced updates, and new hardware every five years or so (which again, is not terribly far away from the way the armed forces IT already works)...

Re:They'll stuff it up

[RotateLeftByte]

no they wouldn't as you say, 'stuff it up'.

They'd patent the sh1t out of it so it is 'stuffed up' for the rest of us.
Remember that the US Military are exempt from patents awarded for work funded by them.
Then all Microsoft need to do is make 'The Internet V2' standard in Windows 8 and watch pretty well every company fall over backwards to implement it.
They would control who the licensed 'Internet V2' to thus kille FOSS, ORacle and probably Apple in one stroke of the pen from the US Patent Office.

Embrace - Done
Extend - Take IPv6, add a few bells & Whistles, patent it
Extinguish - Message from Steve B to Bill G, 'Looks Good'