The Pentagon, which invented the precursor to the Internet 40 years ago, has laid the first connections for a secure, wireless information network that proponents say will fundamentally transform warfare, the New York Times reported Saturday. Estimates are that the Global Information Grid will cost 200 billion dollars in the next decade alone, but take two decades to complete, the Times said.
The new network would fuse US military and intelligence services into a unified system and make volumes of information instantly available to soldiers on the battlefield, the Times said.
Every member of the military would have "a God's-eye view" of the battlefield, said Robert Stevens, chief executive of top US military contractor Lockheed Martin Corporation.
Proponents say it will become the most lethal weapon in the US arsenal and change the military and warfare the way the Internet changed business and culture.
The system would allow "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery" from a spy satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds," Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, according to the Times.
The effort faces staggering technological hurdles.
Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet, is now a consultant to the Pentagon on the project. "I want to make sure what we realise is vision and not hallucination," he told the Times.
"This is sort of like Star Wars, where the policy was, 'Let's go out and build this system,' and technology lagged far behind," he said. "There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals. You just need to temper them with physics and reality."
The military has twice before tried to build information networks for the military.
The 1960s-era World-wide Military Command and Control System often failed in crises. A 25-billion-dollar successor completed in 2003 is already outdated.
Pentagon scientists invented the systems that became the Internet starting four decades ago but the Internet leapt forward once it emerged in the world of commerce a decade ago.
The war net is "an attempt to catch up," Cerf said.
Military contractors and information-technology innovators formed a consortium to develop the war net on September 28, the Times said.
The group includes Boeing, Cisco Systems, General Dynamics, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Oracle, Raytheon, and Sun Microsystems.