The military on television and films is depicted using entirely custom-written software, often on custom-written operating systems. The truth, of course, is more mundane, but of all the technologies that the internet has made possible the one I would least have expected to be picked to run a modern war is Internet Relay Chat. Well, perhaps that and Usenet. My surprise would be taken to the limit, in fact, if it turned out that IRC were run as an open server, albeit from within a private, military only, version of the internet. From the article:
However, chat quickly became overused in some situations, including one chat room at the Combined Air Operations Center that had 900 people participating at once, said Navy Cmdr. Tim Sorber, knowledge officer for Commander, Cruiser-Destroyer Group 8. He spoke today at the American Society of Naval Engineers’ Human Systems Integration Symposium in Vienna, Va.
Such a large number of people in a chat room “is a nightmare,” Sorber said. This is because it takes valuable time to determine who should and shouldn’t be there.
It takes valuable time to determine who ’should and shouldn’t be there’. I feel safer already.
And yet, of course, it does make a certain sense. In a tight spot, you need to be able to talk to the right guy as quickly as possible. The more layers of security in the way, the harder that task will be. Just hope that when you find the right chat room, the mortar control chap is not in the middle of a flame war about which editor is best. Do you think the President of the US goes online as POTUS, Bush2 or Internet1?