The Defense Department is seeking to lower the cost of bandwidth, at a time
when the military services are under great pressure to improve their networking
capabilities on the battlefield.
Although the cost of bandwidth in the civilian sector has dropped considerably,
the Pentagon continues to struggle to provide enough pipes for users across
the globe.
The Pentagon intends to spend about $15 billion during the next several years
to considerably bring down the cost of bandwidth, said John Stenbit, the Defense
Department’s former chief information officer.
He said the long-term plan is to make the entire Defense Department operate
on Internet-based protocols.
“I need to make bandwidth cheap all over, or I can’t go to an internet-based
system,” Stenbit said at an aerospace conference in Singapore.
A key development in Stenbit’s plan is the deployment next year of the
global information grid—bandwidth expansion (GIG-BE) program. GIG-BE is
a switched optical network that will serve Defense Department users at 100 sites
around the world.
This network will deliver data-transfer speeds of 10 megabits per second, or
faster. Science Applications International Corporation is the prime contractor
for the GIG-BE program. Overseeing the project is the Defense Information Systems
Agency.
GIG-BE is one of a cluster of programs designed to facilitate interoperability
and a full net-centric force. Others include the joint tactical radio system,
transformation communications satellites, network centric enterprise services,
and information assurance architecture.
In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. military used 10 times as many communications
systems as it did in the first Gulf War, said Stenbit. “We need to make
communication cheaper, otherwise we would not be able to do this,” he
said.
Internet-based networks are ideal, because they allow users to selectively
retrieve the information they need. Stenbit calls it a “smart-pull”
system. An Internet system would allow each person to be “assigned”
to the right information and also will provide the potential for auditing the
information, Stenbit said.
At press time, Stenbit was scheduled to hand over the chief information officer
position to Francis Joseph Harvey, who was awaiting Senate confirmation. Like
Stenbit, Harvey comes to the Defense Department from the private sector. After
announcing his retirement, Stenbit accepted a position on the National Security
Agency advisory board as an unpaid advisor.