"The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future." So starts an article from the Nov. 13, 2004 NY Times, "Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War".

The article describes Pentagon plans for its "Global Information Grid" or GIG, its own secure network to distribute battlefield information. The effort is an aspect of "network-centric warfare" championed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (see the May '04 post on the Nova "Battle Plan Under Fire" show for more). More battlefield information -- from satellites, other units, data archives, etc. -- will in theory allow soldiers to cut through the fog of war; and more real-time information requires more secure bandwidth than is currently available.

As Rumsfeld is quoted: "Possibly the single most transforming thing in our force will not be a weapons system, but a set of interconnections." More interconnections makes for a more efficient force (better use of resources, in particular information); and a network-form foe (e.g., the resistance in Iraq) can be fought most effectively? by a network-form force.

Whether such an approach is in fact effective is still not univerally accepted; it is, however, very expensive. $200 billion by some estimates once the costs for the special radios, satellites, laptops, cabling, routers, etc. are totalled up.

The pros and cons of "force transformation" and "network-centric warfare" have been debated elsewhere; what is significant I think about this article is the construction of a parallel, military-only Internet. The public 'net is apparently insufficient -- too leaky, insecure, narrow, clogged w/ spam and porn to be of use to the military. The current Internet had its roots in Defense, but was never intended to be a military-only infrastructure. One of its potent strengths is its openness, which allows for emergent properties. A closed-network will never achieve that; perhaps the price tag is how you buy security and robustness when you don't have 1/2 billion naked apes pounding on the keyboards. Or maybe the military's private skynet is ultimately unrealistic. As Vincent Cerf notes in the NYT article, "I want to make sure what we realize is vision and not hallucination... There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals. You just need to temper them with physics and reality."