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This is an archive article published on November 14, 2004
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...
Written by TIM WEINER
New York | November 14, 2004 12:00 AM IST
2 min read
2 min read
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 8212; 8216;8216;a God8217;s-eye view8217;8217; of battle. This 8216;8216;Internet in the sky8217;8217;, Peter Teets, Undersecretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow 8216;8216;Marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open their laptops, request imagery8217;8217; from a spy satellite, and 8216;8216;get it downloaded within seconds8217;8217;.
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 net8217;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 8212; what they call net-centric warfare 8212; will, they say, change the military in the way the Internet has changed business and culture.
8216;8216;Possibly the single most transforming thing in our force,8217;8217; Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, 8216;8216;will not be a weapons system, but a set of interconnections8217;8217;.
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. 8212; NYT
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