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 (). 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 (). 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.