'GIG' could change face of warfare

The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future.

The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats — "a God's-eye view" of battle.

This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, undersecretary of the Air Force, told Congress, 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."

The Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information Grid, or GIG. Conceived six years ago, its first connections were laid six weeks ago. It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build the new war net and its components.

Skeptics say the costs are staggering and the technological hurdles huge.

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and a Pentagon consultant on the war net, said he wondered if the military's dream was realistic. "I want to make sure what we realize is vision and not hallucination," Cerf said.

"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."

Advocates say networked computers will be the most powerful weapon in the American arsenal. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence and soldiers in a globe-girdling network — what they call net-centric warfare — will, they say, change the military in the way the Internet has changed business and culture.

"Possibly the single most transforming thing in our force," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, "will not be a weapons system, but a set of interconnections."

The U.S. military, built to fight nations and armies, now faces stateless enemies without jets, tanks, ships or central headquarters. Sending secret intelligence and stratagems instantly to soldiers in battle would, in theory, make the military a faster, fiercer force against a faceless foe.

Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corp., the nation's biggest military contractor, said he envisioned a "highly secure Internet in which military and intelligence activities are fused" that would shape 21st-century warfare in the way that nuclear weapons shaped the Cold War.

Every member of the military would have "a picture of the battle space, a God's-eye view," he said. "And that's real power."