GIG for GI Joes

The Pentagon is building its own Internet for the wars of the future. The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving pictur...

The Pentagon is building its own Internet 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, Undersecretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow ‘‘Marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open 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. Overall, Pentagon documents suggest, $200 billion or more may go for the war net’s hardware and software in the next decade or so.

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

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‘‘Possibly the single most transforming thing in our force,’’ Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, ‘‘will not be a weapons system, but a set of interconnections’’.

Military contractors and information-technology creators formed a consortium to develop the war net on September 28. The group includes Boeing; Cisco Systems; Factiva, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters; General Dynamics; Hewlett-Packard; Honeywell; IBM; Lockheed Martin; Microsoft; Northrop Grumman; Oracle; Raytheon; and Sun Microsystems. — NYT

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