[Milsurplus] Global Information Grid

[Robert Nickels]

I thought this would be of interest to some here.   And when it doesn't
work, there will always be HF radio!

73, Bob W9RAN


NEW YORK (AFP) - The Pentagon which invented the precursor to the Internet
40 years ago, has laid the first connections for a secure, wireless
information network that proponents say will fundamentally transform
warfare, a US newspaper reported.

Estimates are that the Global Information Grid will cost 200 billion dollars
in the next decade alone, but take two decades to complete, the New York
Times said.   The new network would fuse US military and intelligence
services into a unified system and make volumes of information instantly
available to soldiers on the battlefield, the Times said.   Every member of
the military would have "a God's-eye view" of the battlefield, said Robert
Stevens, chief executive of top US military contractor Lockheed Martin
Corporation.   Proponents say it will become the most lethal weapon in the
US arsenal and change the military and warfare the way the Internet changed
business and culture.

The system would allow "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the
middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery" from a spy
satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds," Peter Teets, under
secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, according to the Times.  The
effort faces staggering technological hurdles.  Vint Cerf, one of the
inventors of the Internet, is now a consultant to the Pentagon on the
project. "I want to make sure what we realize is vision and not
hallucination," he told the Times.   "This is sort of like Star Wars, where
the policy was, 'Let's go out and build this system,' and technology lagged
far behind," he said. "There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals.
You just need to temper them with physics and reality."
The military has twice before tried to build information networks for the
military.

The 1960s-era Worldwide Military Command and Control System often failed in
crises. A 25-billion-dollar successor completed in 2003 is already outdated.
Pentagon scientists invented the systems that became the Internet starting
four decades ago but the Internet leapt forward once it emerged in the world
of commerce a decade ago. The war net is "an attempt to catch up," Cerf
said.  Military contractors and information-technology innovators formed a
consortium to develop the war net on September 28, the Times said.
The group includes Boeing, Cisco Systems, General Dynamics, Hewlett-Packard,
Honeywell, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Oracle,
Raytheon, and Sun Microsystems.