Meet W4
p2pnet.net News:- You already know about the WWW.
Now meet the WWWW – World Wide War Web.
The internet started life as a Pentagon project, but it became the Net as we know it today and now America’s military powers are trying to close the circle with a war net spanning the globe, and tapping satellites in space.
Under it, ‘GIG’ will no longer be just short-hand for ‘gigabyte’. It’ll also be an innocuous abbreviation for Global Information Grid.
The first connections were laid six weeks ago, but “It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build the new war net and its components,” says the New York Times, which also describes the vision of the new web as, “war machines with a common language for all military forces, instantly emitting encyclopedias of lethal information against all enemies”.
Cisco Systems; Hewlett-Packard; Honeywell; I.B.M.; Microsoft; Oracle; Raytheon; and, Sun Microsystems are among the “A-list of military contractors and technology powerhouses” working to, “weave weapons, intelligence and communications into a seamless web”.
“Possibly the single most transforming thing in our force will not be a weapons system, but a set of interconnections,” says US defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in the story, which continues:
“The American military, built to fight nations and armies, now faces stateless enemies without jets, tanks, ships or central headquarters. Sending secret intelligence and stratagems instantly to soldiers in battle would, in theory, make the military a faster, fiercer force against a faceless foe.”
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”.
The NYT story goes on that overall, Pentagon documents suggest war net hardware and software could cost $200 billion or more in the next ten years or so, and has John Garing, strategic planning director at the Defense Information Security Agency, which is starting to build the war net, saying:
“The essence of net-centric warfare is our ability to deploy a war-fighting force anywhere, anytime. Information technology is the key to that.”
The Pentagon has tried this twice before, the report continues.
“Its Worldwide Military Command and Control System, built in the 1960’s, often failed in crises. A $25 billion successor, Milstar, was completed in 2003 after two decades of work. Pentagon officials say it is already outdated: more switchboard than server, more dial-up than broadband, it cannot support 21st-century technology.”
GIG’s scope was described in July by the Government Accountability Office, “the watchdog agency for Congress,” says the NYT.
“Many new multibillion-dollar weapons and satellites are ‘critically dependent on the future network,’ the agency reported. “Despite enormous challenges and risks – many of which have not been successfully overcome in smaller-scale efforts” like missile defense, ‘the Pentagon is depending on the GIG to enable a fundamental transformation in the way military operations are conducted’.”
Tony Montemarano, the Defense Information Security Agency “bandwidth expansion chief,” is quoted as saying, “we will have to precipitously enhance bandwidth,” but admits, “the single biggest obstacle is a cultural one”.
The NYT story also quotes Vint Cerf, often said to be a father of the Net and who’s also Pentagon consultant on the war net, as saying he wondered if the military’s dream was realistic” “I want to make sure what we realize is vision and not hallucination.”
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See:-
war net – Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War, New York Times, November 13, 2004
