Military Operations Go High-Tech

W A S H I N G T O N, Oct. 6 -- Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean aboard a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier a young sailor is taken ill and has severe internal bleeding.

He needs immediate emergency surgery — there is no time to evacuate him to a hospital ashore.

The ship’s surgeon connects via video teleconferencing to Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington D.C., where the head of vascular surgery guides him through a lifesaving process.

A Marine Corps intelligence officer on routine deployment off the coast of Africa receives orders to assemble intelligence about unrest in a nearby nation. The Marines are ordered to begin preparing to evacuate Americans from the capital city.

The intelligence officer logs on to his shipboard computer and gets the latest information from the classified Web pages of the Defense Intelligence Agency and State Department.

Those are just two examples of how the Navy and Marine Corps say their planned five-year, $7 billion Intranet will reform military operations.

Today’s contract award to Electronic Data Systems Corp. of Plano, Texas, to establish and run a single integrated Navy-Marine Corps network is being characterized as perhaps the largest single government computer contract awarded outside the government.

For months, four key companies have battled for the initial five-year contract. EDS’s competitors were Computer Sciences Corp., of El Segundo, Calif., IBM Corp.of Armonk, N.Y. and General Dynamics of Falls Church, Va.

Getting Connected

After years of watching television pictures of high-tech Navy fighters sending their precision guided weapons through the tops of buildings in Iraq and Serbia, most Americans — even those who are computer junkies — probably do not realize just how antiquated some aspects of military computer networks remain.

Military personnel say simple matters such as network congestion often keep them from getting access to information. The new Navy Marine Corps Intranet is aimed at changing that.