Information Warfare: June 3, 2002

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In Afghanistan, the "battlefield Internet" is in use. There are hundreds of networked PCs in use by American troops in Afghanistan. The IP addresses and other details are secret, and the security measures on the military servers are substantial. But anyone with access to the "Tactical Web Page" (URL not available) can see Allied operations in Afghanistan in real time. Locations of friendly, and suspected enemy, troops are shown on maps at the web page, as well an abundance of other data military commanders need to run operations. Commanders and staffs constantly confer in password protected chat rooms. All of this battlefield web had it's origins during the 1991 Gulf War (when the web was still under development), when troops improvised with their PCs, using commercial networks to set up primitive military communications webs. The success of these efforts was noted, and when the World Wide Web appeared a few years later, the military knew what they wanted to do.

 

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