The Global Information Grid (GIG), an open-yet-secure mega-Internet in which all soldiers may have their own IPv6 address, is moving from the concept phase and into the hardware/software development phase (see the figure). In a sense, it's ironic that the defense and intelligence establishment is reinventing what it helped to create in the first place, but the commercial Internet is too vulnerable to be a military asset.
The Internet itself is the offspring of the military's ARPANET. FidoNet, UUCP, and other networks soon followed. Over time, TCP/IP made all of these systems interoperable. That ad-hoc development allowed for too many weakpoints and hidey-holes in the Internet and the World Wide Web, making it unacceptable for battlefield command and control operations. So, it was back to the drawing board.
GENESIS
GIG was born on Sept. 19, 2002 when a directive from the Deputy Secretary of Defense titled "Global Information Grid Overarching Policy" spelled out its definition: "The globally interconnected, end-to-end set of information capabilities, associated processes, and personnel for collecting, processing, storing, disseminating and managing information on demand to warfighters, policy makers, and support personnel."
The paper mandated that the GIG include all owned and leased communications and computing systems and services, software, applications, data, security services, and other associated services like National Security Systems.
Its purpose would be to support all Department of Defense (DoD), national security, and related intelligence community missions and functions—"in war and in peace"—from any operating location: bases, posts, camps, stations, etc. Additionally, it would provide interfaces to coalition, allied, and non-DoD users and systems.
That's the top-level definition from a long document, so naturally, it's nebulous. To brief Congress, the General Accounting office published an assessment, The Global Information Grid and Challenges Facing Its Implementation. Running only 37 pages, it's one of the clearest overviews, summarizing how the GIG is intended to upgrade military operations (see the table). If you download it, scroll down to page 31 for a bibliography of relevant documents (see "Use The Net To Learn More About The Grid,").
The GIG has its roots in the concept of network-centric warfare, which is now more often called network-centric operations. Sources on the Web point to Admiral William Owens' description of a "system of systems" in a 1996 paper for the Institute of National Security Studies as a seminal event. Owens wrote of a potential system of intelligence sensors, command and control systems, and precision weapons for enhanced situational awareness, rapid target assessment, and distributed weapon assignment.
Also in 1996, the Joint Chiefs of Staff released a paper on "full-spectrum dominance." Subsequently, John Gartska, David Alberts, and Fred Stein wrote a book called Network Centric Warfare for the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) that related a number of business case studies to a new theory of warfare based on a military network.
Toward the end of 2003, John Osterholz, the Pentagon's director of architecture and interoperability, addressed the top Internet hardware companies at an IPv6 Summit. (The GIG was going to use version 6 of the Internet Protocol, with its vastly larger capacity for IP addresses and improved security over IPv4, by sometime this year.) Osterholz said the military wanted to digitize every individual soldier and push data to the "very edges of the network," including sensors, remote platforms, and mobile force structures."
In support of the Pentagon's efforts, the North American IPv6 Task Force announced in October the launch of North America's largest IPv6 pilot network. Known as Moonv6 and taking place across the U.S. at multiple locations, the project is the largest permanently deployed multivendor IPv6 network in the world. The next Moonv6 Project will get under way the week of June 18, focusing on end-to-end secure network demonstrations, including rich media, voice, and software applications. This will hopefully validate real peer-to-peer applications without the need of a central authority.
Reprints
