Question: What do you do if you’re the Pentagon, manage the most capable military in the world but recognize a general is six degrees of separation away from a private and there is a lag between first-hand knowledge and quick-fire decisions?
Answer: You turn to the whiz kids who developed the Internet and Global Positioning Satellites to devise an improved networking technology.
You turn to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Spawned by frustration that the Soviets launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957 without the United States knowing about it until it happened, President Eisenhower commissioned DARPA four months later.
Over the past 50 years, these scientific and technical geeks initiated programs for the Saturn rocket and classified Soviet-spying satellites called Discoverer and Corona; brainstormed stealth airplanes and photon detectors; realized structural applications for rare metals like beryllium, stronger than steel but lighter than aluminum; and created the Network Centric Radio System, enabling military forces with incompatible radios to communicate.
Preston Marshall, a DARPA project manager with the strategic technology office, had this to say in August 2007 about tactical networking:
Our new vision is self-forming information infrastructures, which automatically organize services and applications, position them in the network, advertise their existence, and adapt them as the needs change.The system we envision forms and operates autonomously; untouched by human minds…. where the outcome of armed conflict is not solely based on generals but also on real-time decisions of privates.
DARPA is serious about this, evident by yesterday’s one-year grant of nearly $500,000 to computer science professor Patrick Crowley, who will help in this network creation. He said computer equipment at the Department of Defense is limited by the number of feeds that one can view simultaneously.
“That’s the kind of thing that I hope our network can do,” Crowley said. “In a short amount of time you should be able to have not only video feeds from the predator, but feeds from individual soldiers in the field.”
The key to making tomorrow’s networks is using faster, cheaper, and more reliable technology that exists today which DARPA did not know about in the 1960s, said Marshall’s colleague Tim Gibson.
You are reading this sentence right now because of a technology known as packet routing. But the technology is 40 years old, designed around then-standards of 56,000 bits per second, not today’s billions of bits per second.
As a result, Gibson said, DARPA is developing an optically-switched multiplexed network, capable of 100 terrabits per second. The engineers are looking to the future ala science fiction and bringing futuristic ideas into the present.
Today’s networks are designed “around a preconceived and static allocation of services,” Marshall said. “We envision a future in which networks not only design themselves, but also collaborate with application services to jointly optimize performance.”
“Not only do we want more than Captain Kirk. We want more flexibility, more power, and we need to empower all crew members, not just the bridge crew. And, instead of the Enterprise’s complex communications station, we want something as simple to use as the Internet jack in your office and the phone on your desk.”
Through folks like DARPA and IARPA (a new agency formed through the intelligence community), you will soon not only be unable to distinguish Kirk’s communicator from your iPhone but you will see the military continue to adapt social networking and bring the armed forces into a whole new world of communication on and off the battlefield.
Related posts:
- Social Media: Banning vs Blocking
- Why Social Media is a Fad
- Embracing 5770 with Humor, Heritage, Social Media, and Birthright Israel
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
978-558-0008
ConvoTrack
Comments on this entry are closed.