more on Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Andy Duff <andy.duff () edengene com>
Date: November 15, 2004 5:50:06 AM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: RE: [IP] NYTimes.com Article: Pentagon Envisioning a Costly 
Internet for War

Dave,

Linkage? I recently re-read the "Project for a New American Century" 
document published in 2000. [The full document is at 
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf]

In the light of Tim Weiner's article and Vint Cerf's comments, it's 
interesting to remember the original text in this document (which was 
the output of a team including Paul Wolfowitz in 2000):

<<Over the next several decades, the United States must field a global 
system of missile defenses, divine ways to control the new 
"international commons" of space and cyberspace, and build new kinds of 
conventional forces for different strategic challenges and a new 
technological environment.>>

From my own attendance at earlier days at ICANN conferences in 2001-2, 
the phrase <<the US must [...] divine ways to control the new 
"international commons" of [...] cyberspace>> rings particularly true. 
Tread softly...

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: 13 November 2004 05:02
To: Ip
Subject: [IP] NYTimes.com Article: Pentagon Envisioning a Costly
Internet for War




Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War

November 13, 2004
  By TIM WEINER





The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's
world wide web for the wars of the future.

The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a
moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats - "a
God's-eye view" of battle.

This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, under secretary of
the Air Force, told Congress, 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."

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 the
new war net and its components.

Skeptics say the costs are staggering and the technological
hurdles huge.

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and a
Pentagon consultant on the war net, said he wondered if the
military's dream was realistic. "I want to make sure what
we realize is vision and not hallucination," Mr. Cerf said.


"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."

Advocates say networked computers will be the most powerful
weapon in the American arsenal. Fusing weapons, secret
intelligence and soldiers in a globe-girdling network -
what they call net-centric warfare - will, they say, change
the military in the way the Internet has changed business
and culture.

"Possibly the single most transforming thing in our
force,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said,
"will not be a weapons system, but a set of
interconnections."

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.

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."

Pentagon traditionalists, however, ask if net-centric
warfare is nothing more than an expensive fad. They point
to the street fighting in Falluja and Baghdad, saying
firepower and armor still mean more than fiber optic cables
and wireless connections.

But the biggest challenge in building a war net may be the
military bureaucracy. For decades, the Army, Navy, Air
Force and Marines have built their own weapons and
traditions. A network, advocates say, would cut through
those old ways.

The ideals of this new warfare are driving many of the
Pentagon's spending plans for the next 10 to 15 years. Some
costs are secret, but billions have already been spent.

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.

Hundreds of thousands of new radios are likely to cost $25
billion. Satellite systems for intelligence, surveillance,
reconnaissance and communications will be tens of billions
more. The Army's program for a war net alone has a $120
billion price tag.

Over all, Pentagon documents suggest, $200 billion or more
may go for the war net's hardware and software in the next
decade or so. "The question is one of cost and technology,"
said John Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense, now
president of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington.

"We want to know all things at all times everywhere in the
world? Fine," Mr. Hamre said. "Do we know what this
staring, all-seeing eye is that we're going to put in space
is? Hell, no."

The military wants to know "everything of interest to us,
all the time," in the words of Steven A. Cambone, the under
secretary of defense for intelligence. He has told Congress
that military intelligence - including secret satellite
surveillance covering most of the earth - will be posted on
the war net and shared with troops.

John Garing, strategic planning director at the Defense
Information Security Agency, now starting to build the war
net, said: "The essence of net-centric warfare is our
ability to deploy a war-fighting force anywhere, anytime.
Information technology is the key to that."

Military contractors - and information-technology creators
not usually associated with weapons systems - formed a
consortium to develop the war net on Sept. 28. The group
includes an A-list of military contractors and technology
powerhouses: Boeing; Cisco Systems; Factiva, a joint
venture of Dow Jones and Reuters; General Dynamics;
Hewlett-Packard; Honeywell; I.B.M.; Lockheed Martin;
Microsoft; Northrop Grumman; Oracle; Raytheon; and Sun
Microsystems. They are working to weave weapons,
intelligence and communications into a seamless web.

The Pentagon has tried this twice before.

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.

The Pentagon's scientists and engineers, starting four
decades ago, invented the systems that became the Internet.
Throughout the cold war, their computer power ran far ahead
of the rest of the world.

Then the world eclipsed them. The nation's military and
intelligence services started falling behind when the
Internet exploded onto the commercial scene a decade ago.
The war net is "an attempt to catch up," Mr. Cerf said.

It has been slowly evolving for at least six years. In
1999, Pentagon officials told Congress that "this
monumental task will span a quarter-century or more." This
year, the vision gained focus, and Pentagon officials
started explaining it in some detail to Congress.

Its scope was described in July by the Government
Accountability Office, the watchdog agency for Congress.

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."

According to Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon's
Office of Force Transformation, "What we are really talking
about is a new theory of war."

Linton Wells II, the chief information officer at the
Defense Department, said net-centric principles were
becoming "the center of gravity" for war planners.

"The tenets are broadly accepted throughout the Defense
Department," said Mr. Wells, who directs the Office of
Networks and Information Integration. "Senior leadership
can articulate them. We still have a way to go in terms of
why we should spend X billion dollars on a certain program.
In the fight between widgets and digits, widgets tend to
win."

He said $24 billion would be spent in the next five years
to build new war net connections. "No doubt these are
expensive," Mr. Wells said. "Technology developments always
are."

Advocates acknowledge that weaving American military and
intelligence services into a unified system is a huge
challenge.

The military is filled with "tribal representatives behind
tribal workstations interpreting tribal hieroglyphics," in
the words of Gen. John Jumper, the Air Force chief of
staff. "What if the machines talked to each other?" he
asked.

That is the vision of the new web: war machines with a
common language for all military forces, instantly emitting
encyclopedias of lethal information against all enemies.

To realize this vision, the military must solve a
persistent problem. It all boils down to bandwidth.

Bandwidth measures how much data can flow between
electronic devices. Too little for civilians means a Web
page takes forever to load. Too little for soldiers means
the war net will not work.

The bandwidth requirements seem bottomless. The military
will need 40 or 50 times what it used at the height of the
Iraq war last year, a Rand Corporation study estimates -
enough to give front-line soldiers bandwidth equal to
downloading three feature-length movies a second.

The Congressional Research Service said the Army, despite
plans to spend $20 billion on the problem, may wind up with
a tenth of the bandwidth it needs. The Army, in its
"lessons learned" report from Iraq, published in May, said
"there will probably never be enough resources to establish
a complete and functioning network of communications,
sensors, and systems everywhere in the world."

The bottleneck is already great. In Iraq, front-line
commanders and troops fight frequent software freezes. "To
make net-centric warfare a reality," said Tony Montemarano,
the Defense Information Security Agency's bandwidth
expansion chief, "we will have to precipitously enhance
bandwidth."

The military must also change its own culture.

For
decades, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have built
separate weapons, radios, frequencies and traditions. They
guard their "rice bowls" - their turf - from rival
services.

But Mr. Rumsfeld's vision depends on interoperability:
warfare using all four services in joint operations.

In a net-centric world, "you would not have a Army, Navy,
Air Force and Marines," but a unified force, said William
Owens, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.


For the Pentagon's visionaries, Mr. Montemarano said, "the
single biggest obstacle is a cultural one.''

"Breaking these rice bowls - that's a huge job."


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/technology/13warnet.html?
ex=1101321282&ei=1&en=b51a8a676bcc1976


---------------------------------

Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine
reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like!
Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy
now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here:

http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?
mode=SubscriptionT1&ExternalMediaCode=W24AF



HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters
or other creative advertising opportunities with The
New York Times on the Web, please contact
onlinesales () nytimes com or visit our online media
kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo

For general information about NYTimes.com, write to
help () nytimes com.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as andy () luddo com
To manage your subscription, go to
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: 
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

________________________________________________________________________
This email has been scanned for viruses by the MessageLabs SkyScan
service.
________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________
This email has been scanned for viruses by the MessageLabs SkyScan
service.

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To manage your subscription, go to
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/