On a higher level of organization, the same logic of coordination and networking applies across the individual armed forces. Single branches of the American military establishment can no longer play the lone-wolf game. Interservice rivalry (though still very real) is officially out of fashion in the post-Cold War world of rapid deployment. Maximum speed, maximum impact, and minimum American casualties all demand that the services be fully coordinated, that all assets be brought into play in a smooth and utterly crushing synchrony. Navy ships support land offensives, Air Force strikes support mud-slogging Marines. And space-based satellite intelligence, satellite communications, and satellite navigation support everybody.
That is the core of modern American strategic military doctrine, and that is what Col. Thorpe's new project, the Distributed Simulation Internet, is meant to accomplish for the military in the realm of cyberspace.
DARPA is an old hand at computer networking. The original ARPANET of 1969 grew up to become today's globe-spanning civilian-based Internet. SIMNET was another DARPA war-child, conceived in 1983 and first online in May 1986. DARPA invented SIMNET just as it invented the Internet, but DARPA spun SIMNET off to the US Army for day-to-day operations.
DARPA, by its nature, sponsors the cutting edge; the bleeding edge. The Distributed Simulation Internet, projected for the turn of the century, is to be a creature of another order entirely from SIMNET. Ten thousand linked simulators! Entire literal armies online. Global, real-time, broadband, fiber-