United Press International,
ARLINGTON, Va.: Although sometimes depicted as a bastion of tradition, the U.S. Navy has a better track record than other military services at generating innovative ideas about future warfare.
It was the Navy that first grasped the significance of the information revolution for war fighters, and the Navy that first developed the concept of network-centric warfare — an idea later appropriated by the rest of the joint force to explain the goals of military transformation.
It isn't hard to understand why the Navy has an affinity for net-centricity, because when you operate a forward-deployed fleet scattered around the world, it focuses the mind on the problem of staying connected. With fewer than 300 ships in the fleet and a rapidly expanding array of adversaries, the Navy can't hope to have every asset it would like nearby when dangers arise. So it has to think creatively about how to use new technologies to get the most mileage out of whatever joint capabilities are available.
That has led the service to a vision it calls “FORCEnet,” the metaphorical glue that will hold the future fleet together. The goal of FORCEnet is to migrate Navy communications from a legacy, “need-to-know” mindset to a far more open, “need-to-share” culture. The basic idea is to break down barriers to the transmission, fusion and interpretation of information so that all war fighters with appropriate security clearances have access to the full information resources of the joint force. This openness closely resembles the operating principles of the Internet.
The core of the Internet is a series of technical protocols that allow users to convey packets of information across thousands of independent networks as if they were a single, unified web. The Navy would like to achieve the same feat, but it is burdened by an installed base of legacy hardware and software that was not designed to accommodate such openness. The FORCEnet concept is supposed to align new technology investments so that the naval communications environment comes to resemble the Internet in its flexibility and accessibility.
