NEWS TRANSCRIPT from the United States Department of Defense<br /><br />DoD News Briefing<br />John Stenbit, ASD (Networks and Information Integration)<br /> Friday, June 13, 2003 - 11:00 a.m. EDT<br /><br />(Briefing on DoD's adoption of the next-generation Internet protocol. Also<br />participating was Bryan Whitman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for public<br />affairs (media operations). A photo from today's briefing can be found on the Web<br />at http://www.defenselink.mil/photos/Jun2003/030613-D-9880W-063.html<br />[http://www.defenselink.mil/photos/Jun2003/030613-D-9880W-063.html] .)<br /><br />Whitman: Same faces! Thank you for joining us for our second briefing of the morning.<br /><br />I'd like to kind of reintroduce to you Mr. John Stenbit. He's the department's chief<br />information officer. Many of you probably remember him as the ASD C3I. His title has<br />recently changed a little bit when he became the assistant secretary of Defense for<br />Networks and Information Integration. He continues to transform DoD's command and<br />control systems, but this change reflects the creation of the new position,<br />undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.<br /><br />The purpose of today's briefing is to inform you about DoD's adoption of the<br />next-generation Internet protocols and the implication that it has for war fighting,<br />as well as for business managers.<br /><br />So with that, let's go ahead and get started. Mr. Stenbit?<br /><br />Stenbit: All right. Thanks. Hi. Good to see you.<br /><br />I thought this was a significant enough issue that we should chat about it and put<br />it in context, so that you have an understanding of what we were doing.<br /><br />You've heard many of us at this podium, well beyond myself, talk about the<br />transformation from -- of the department towards a network- centric activity, and<br />that means different things to different people. But from my point of view, there's<br />been a lot of activity about programs, and we've talked about a lot of them recently<br />-- lasers in space and the Global Information Grid Bandwidth Expansion program,<br />which we actually had a milestone meeting on yesterday, although Bloomberg, I think,<br />twisted my words when they put it in their press release. I clearly said we had the<br />meeting, and we have a couple of things to work out before it's approved. But he<br />leapt to the assumption that they will be worked out. I actually assume the same<br />thing. Just not true today.<br /><br />But we are now getting to the point we are having milestone decisions about<br />programs. Many of you reported on the FCS, the Future Combat System, Milestone B,<br />which is about a month ago now. The heart and soul of that entire program is network<br />operations, gluing together the entire family of vehicles. And so we're now getting<br />from beyond the point of talking about it and into the point of actually getting<br />programs done.<br /><br />It's really important that the programs that move forward, and in particular the<br />ones that I was concerned about were, like FCS and the laser communication<br />satellites, which is also coming up on a milestone here later this year -- that they<br />were able to face a certain world about what the crucial issues of the network were<br />that they were going to have to interface with, as opposed to an uncertain world of<br />what it was that actually was going to be the heart and soul of the DoD network.<br /><br />Now, the Internet has been around for a long time. It currently operates on what is<br />called Internet Version 4. There are lots of issues that have come up with Internet<br />Version 4 in the past; there are lots of commercial fixes to fix some of these kinds<br />of problems. The three major ones, one of which is not of particular import to the<br />DoD, but is to the Europeans, and that's the number of addresses you can actually<br />access. So here we have just a simple problem of how many bits are in the address<br />field.<br /><br />There are a couple that are much more interesting to the DoD. One is some changes<br />enable us to do a better job of end-to-end security. Another, which is important<br />both commercially -- actually, I shouldn't say that that's not important<br />commercially, but it's certainly important to us. Another which is important to all<br />of us is what's called quality of service. And I don't want to belabor it, but<br />today, if you send a packet on the Internet, nobody's guaranteeing you that it's<br />going to get to the other end. And if ever you have watched a video conference on an<br />Internet channel, or even spoken on a voice over IP phone, you know that that<br />guarantee won't be given very shortly because every so often those packets drop out<br />and it jumps or the voice sounds a little funny.<br /><br />Part of the workarounds with respect to Internet 4, that are going to move into<br />Internet 6, are to improve this. It's called quality of service. It allows somebody<br />to be able to tag some packets that they go with other groups, as opposed to being<br />independent, and then allows some deviation in how those are handled. Those are<br />important parameters for the DoD, very important.<br /><br />So we believe that the evolution of the Internet Protocol Version 6 debate, which<br />has got far enough along so that people now deliver hardware and software that are<br />compatible with both standards -- the current IP 4 standard and the prospective IP 6<br />standard -- that we need to make it clear to our programs that are of major<br />development activities, that are going to come online in the 2008, 2009, and 2010<br />time frame, that they can be certain that the IP 6 standard, as it evolves, is what<br />we're going to be using as a department standard. And that allows us to think about<br />how we would go from end-to-end in the communications system where the GIG bandwidth<br />expansion program may attach to an intelligence center and gather some packets of<br />information, get it through the GIG bandwidth expansion to a terminal that would go<br />to the laser satellite, which would then go down to either a future combat system or<br />somebody else using JTRS radios or other kinds of radios. We -- if we're going to<br />send those packets end-to-end, we have to have a standard that's going to be our<br />standard for all of these systems. Now -- so that's why we did what we did.<br /><br />Now, let me tell you exactly what we did. We're anticipating moving the department<br />to the use of IP 6 in about 2008. For us to even come close to doing that, we need<br />to start to have people face the reality that we're going to do that and start to<br />buy things now. So, the actual policy<br />[http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2003/d20030609nii.pdf] , which I believe there's<br />a copy -- Ken, is that correct?<br /><br />Staff: Yes, sir.<br /><br />Stenbit: -- that talks about the fact that we're going to insist that acquisitions<br />and programs that move on after the first of the next fiscal year, which is October,<br />will be IP 6-compatible. So, we need to build the inventory of systems that have<br />procured software and hardware on a scale which is actually slower than the<br />replication that happens in the commercial world -- they usually sort of roll over<br />all of this stuff every two years or so. We tend to be a little bit slower than<br />that. So, we're trying to give ourselves five years to go through what is, in<br />effect, an obsolescence criteria here.<br /><br />In the meantime, we're going to select several large portions of the DoD<br />establishment to switch over to IP 6 earlier, so we can get a good handle on what<br />actually occurs. But we will pick subsets that are large enough to be interesting,<br />but controlled enough that we can actually control the input so that we have a valid<br />experiment. And while we have some ideas about what those are, there's a process<br />going on where we're going to decide that. But I would anticipate we're going to<br />have a major part of the DoD move to IP 6 in 2005. We will look at what happens. We<br />will pick another one in 2006 and we'll pick another one in 2007. And it will be the<br />results of those three experiments that will set the criteria about whether we<br />actually pull the switch in 2008.<br /><br />I guess I need to only say one thing: Whenever you do this, somebody's not going to<br />have moved. So, we've got to start the problem of how do we interface with those<br />that haven't moved, whether they're ours or people out on the Internet. But you've<br />got to start that process sometime. And once again, I'd rather that the future<br />system start with the idea it's IP 6 and start worrying about how they look<br />backwards, as opposed to sort of delaying that decision as long as they can.<br /><br />So, that's the purpose of the issue. I think it's an important validation of the<br />work that's gone on, absolutely, outside the Defense Department, although we have<br />participated in the forums; but that the Internet community is moving forward;<br />they've recognized these problems -- those are the kind of problems we have. We're<br />comfortable that they're moving toward solutions, however they come out, that we'll<br />adapt our systems to.<br /><br />So that's basically what I wanted to talk about. And if any of you have any<br />questions, I'd be happy to take them.<br /><br />Q: Can you explain what this means in terms of the commercial spin-offs and how<br />individual computer-users might benefit from this DoD move to promote --<br /><br />Stenbit: We're actually -- we're actually taking advantage of the commercial<br />movement that's going on. The commercial industry has its own transition<br />difficulties. There are people who have vested interest in staying in the past<br />because that's how they made their money, building this little patch on IP 4 that<br />makes something go away and makes people happier in their service. There are other<br />people who would like to get this stuff all into a standard.<br /><br />I think the real pressure here on the commercial side, at least as I understand it<br />-- and this is not -- I don't go out and -- this is not how I spend my life -- the<br />Europeans really need more addresses. So I think the actual push to move from IP 4<br />to IP 6 will not be driven by us. Our announcement today, and our execution on this<br />policy will move it along because we are a large buyer of Internet-compatible<br />devices and communications. But I think it's the commercial people that will<br />actually cause this trigger to be pulled, and we're assuming that will happen in a<br />time scale which is consistent with what I have just been describing.<br /><br />Q: And what kind of devices -- can you give us, in simple language, a rundown of the<br />impact that this would have on the sorts of devices, both that DoD buys and that<br />industry and consumers buy? Will they need new --<br /><br />Stenbit: Fundamentally, devices that either attach to the networks, or are the<br />networks -- so routers. If you have a PDA, a Palm Pilot that you can now pull down<br />the Internet or e-mail, that uses IP 4 to do that communication. Software which is<br />written that uses the Internet in an effective way of sharing data and applications<br />different from having it all in the same machine, uses assumptions about the<br />Internet Protocol about where to go pick the bits in order to do their job.<br /><br />So this is actually a pretty intrusive change. But as I say, it's not driven by the<br />DoD's use. It is, in fact, driven by commercial uses. And we have basically made the<br />choice that we're going to -- we're comfortable enough with the progress that's been<br />made in the commercial world that we're going to stick with that, however it<br />evolves, because it will change over time, but we're going to change with it because<br />our suppliers are going to change with it to meet that standard.<br /><br />Q: And what happened to IP 5? You're going from 4 to 6.<br /><br />Stenbit: Don't ask me. You have to ask some Internet person. I don't know.<br /><br />Q: But is there such a thing --<br /><br />Stenbit: Probably. Could be. I have no idea. I assume they are logical people, and I<br />assume there was one and they decided that wasn't the way to go.<br /><br />Q: How defined is this standard? Is there a world body that defines it somewhere?<br />And if so, who is on it? And does DoD play a role? How does this work?<br /><br />Stenbit: Once again, you'd be better served by asking some of the commercial people.<br />But basically, the Internet is uncontrolled.<br /><br />Q: Right.<br /><br />Stenbit: There is a group, which is an ad hoc group. And Marilyn, do you know the<br />name of it?<br /><br />Staff: Internet Engineering Task Force.<br /><br />Stenbit: Thank you very much. Internet Engineering Task Force. But basically, it's<br />people that get together and discuss how the Internet is going, what the problems<br />are, and where we should go. And it is a self-governing institution. But what<br />happened in the past is that that particular body has been sufficiently effective at<br />coming to convergence that people like Cisco or Microsoft or IBM or somebody starts<br />embodying those things into their products. And that's what really happens, because<br />it's sort of a two-way issue. They talk about it for a while, and then they say,<br />okay, we're going to go make these changes. Some of them are application overlays.<br />We're now talking about one that's a little bit more fundamental, so it's got to<br />happen on the equipment that makes the Internet run. It's got to operate on the<br />equipment that connects in a communication sense to the Internet, and it's got to<br />work with the applications that then connect to the Internet to get data.<br /><br />So this is a bigger deal. It's going to take longer. It's been going on for quite a<br />long time. Today if you go buy most equipment of the Internet-specific variety like<br />Cisco, it's already delivered with Internet 4 and Internet 6 compatibility. So if<br />somebody decided tomorrow to switch the Internet to IP 6, some people would be able<br />to switch; some people wouldn't. What we're trying to do is get our folks in the<br />position that whenever the decision is made on the outside to switch, we're ready.<br />And more importantly, on our own internal systems, which we control a little bit<br />more, we're going to then be prepared -- as I say, we're taking a target date of<br />2008, so it's not like we're thinking about it tomorrow.<br /><br />Q: Well, when you say switch, is this -- are these changes incremental, or does<br />somebody sort of at one point in the Internet world at large flip a switch and say,<br />"Okay, now we're on 6"?<br /><br />Stenbit: I think that's what's going to happen. And then what's going to happen is<br />that there will be businesses that connect from 6s back to IP 4. But the business --<br />but the future business will then be dominated by moving forward on IP 6 instead of<br />looking backwards to "how I fix IP 4." That's what I'm trying to get us ahead of the<br />power curve on. But you are correct, this is not going to be a magic thing that<br />occurs simultaneously worldwide. It will be an evolution. We'll do the same<br />evolution as everybody else. I already described that we intend to partition our<br />world into at least three subsets that we're going to try first to see how it all<br />goes before we actually commit to going the whole way.<br /><br />Q: NIPRNET and SIPRNET currently are on version 4?<br /><br />Stenbit: Absolutely.<br /><br />Q: And could they be transitioned to 6 before the rest of the mainstream Internet<br />goes to 6?<br /><br />Stenbit: Not today. Not without doing what we are just talking about.<br /><br />Q: Theoretically though, they could be one of those three subsystems?<br /><br />Stenbit: Absolutely, they could be. In fact, one of them is considered -- I'll leave<br />that out. One of them is being considered. But there are others. And I hate to do<br />the list, but let me give you as an example, one that might be considered is NMCI,<br />which is a very large population of users using still, from our point of view, more<br />non-standard applications than we would wish, although we're getting a<br />standardization on the applications. But let's assume we got to our Nirvana, and it<br />was all -- it was standards applications, and it was an integrated system with<br />configuration control and end-to-end security. There's a refresh in that contract<br />coming up in a couple years. Were we to say that refresh gets it all ready to go to<br />IP-6 and use that as one of the ones, that's the kind of experiment that I think<br />might be useful because it's large, it's configuration-managed, and we can sort of<br />isolate its effects from other people's effects. But that's not a statement that<br />it's one of them. Admiral Munns still has a lot of work to do.<br /><br />Q: Okay, thanks.<br /><br />Q: Is there any estimate as far as how much this is going to cost and if the<br />services are going to have to start building that into their requirements or<br />acquisitions going forward?<br /><br />Stenbit: There's two kinds of costs. The one, which is to buy the software that is<br />compatible with both or the hardware that's compatible with both, and that's<br />basically going to slowly but surely become part of the price that the actual<br />vendors put out. And they're still going to compete with each other. So no, I don't<br />think at that level, you're going to see an enormous amount of cost change. Were you<br />to all of a sudden, on one day, decide you had to shift everything from one to the<br />other, and you gave an enormous order to somebody, it's entirely feasible that you<br />might not get the best deal you've ever seen. But that's not our intention. That's<br />why we're giving ourselves five years.<br /><br />The cost that's real is that if you for awhile run a router that has to work both<br />ways, it's going to go slower. If you have to run a software that works both ways<br />because of some form of transition difficulty, it's going to run slower. So those<br />are costs that are real.<br /><br />On the other hand -- and I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna about this -- processing<br />speeds these days are going up much faster than whatever we think we can find<br />applications to run. So while I believe that to be real cost, it doesn't keep me<br />awake at night.<br /><br />Q: Is there anything about this transition that reminds you -- should be or could be<br />compared to the preparations for Y2K? That was the last time that the world geared<br />up for a major transition change, made all these kinds of investments and such. How<br />would you relate this to that sort of a event, in terms of --<br /><br />Stenbit: This is a lot more voluntary.<br /><br />Q: (Off mike.)<br /><br />Stenbit: Well, no, I mean it seriously. I mean, some people looked at some issues,<br />discovered some classic vulnerabilities that said when the date rolls over, some<br />things are going to be strained when it gets to be zeros. Some things are going to<br />be -- I mean, the system I use at home to keep track of my checks went back to 1900.<br />Okay? It has a hard time balancing my checkbook, because it thought it was out of<br />date or whatever.<br /><br />But in any case, those kinds of issues you knew were going to happen on a given day,<br />and so Y2K was a process of "Okay, let's see how rigorously we can go out and<br />re-grab configuration control and make sure that that doesn't happen to us."<br /><br />That led to a pretty healthy increase in sales from all the people that -- they<br />decided, "I'm not going to go work that with my old system. Now is the time to go<br />buy the new stuff, which is certified and so forth and so on."<br /><br />I don't think that's what's going to happen with IP 6. I think you're going to see a<br />curve which has a slope of acceptance, and there will be more and more people doing<br />it. And at some point the lever will switch and the number of people making money<br />doing IP 4-based systems will go down, and the number of people making IP 6 money<br />will go up. And once that starts to happen, it's the economy that causes the speed.<br />But it happens rather quickly.<br /><br />Q: When do you think that might happen? When's your own best guess?<br /><br />Stenbit: Well, my best guess is it's going to happen commercially before 2008, or I<br />wouldn't have chosen 2008. But I am fully prepared to -- whenever it happens, we're<br />going to have to start to worry about that. So, I'm comfortable that the policy we<br />just chose is a correct one, which is if we don't start buying this stuff today,<br />we're in trouble whenever it happens. We're not going to do it internally because we<br />have a larger -- a longer time to recapitalize our systems, but we'd like to give<br />them a head start to get ready for it. And so, it's anybody's guess about where that<br />tilt occurs. But when I go ask people about it, the range of estimates is 2006,<br />2007. I think I heard somebody say 2005.<br /><br />But we chose 2008 for a different reason. 2008 is a time frame where programs that<br />get started now start to get into the stage where they're actually really building<br />things, as opposed to just developing them. But they have to develop them with an<br />idea of what it is they're going to build. And they're going to start to get<br />deployed towards the end of the decade. And I don't want it to be ambiguous for them<br />what world they're going to live in. And we do have to make some provision that it<br />goes end-to-end, because otherwise, we won't be network-centric.<br /><br />So, this is the first of many. And I think it's worthy of coming down and getting<br />hot in front of the lights to talk about it.<br /><br />Q: Could you be a little more specific about the benefits to DoD of moving to IP 6?<br /><br />Stenbit: Yeah. They're really embodied in the fact of going net-centric, which are<br />real, and we can -- if you want, I would be happy to talk about that, too. But the<br />bottom line is that there are -- as I say, there are three major issues, plus one<br />just common-sense one. The common-sense one is if the commercial world's going to go<br />to IP 6, we're not going to stay on IP 4. That would be silly. I mean, we are a<br />captive of the standards process. There's no question about that. So, that's<br />pragmatic, okay. That wouldn't have me come down to give a speech about it, I think.<br /><br />The real issues are end-to-end security is done differently in a network-centered<br />world than it is in a communications-of-telephones or in a broadcast -- which is<br />basically what we do today. That's done by encrypting the links -- you sort of know<br />where the link's going from to -- the little less control after it gets to the other<br />end; how many people get documents copied and so forth and so on. But in fact, we<br />have procedures to do all of that end-to-end security. But it's done as if the<br />person who -- it's sort of a document mentality or a telephone mentality, which is<br />the person that started it decides what the classification is, encrypts it at that<br />classification. If the person at the other end doesn't have the crypto that works,<br />they won't get the data; if they do, they will. And then they have control<br />mechanisms about how they store it and so forth and so on.<br /><br />In a network, you don't know who you're sending to and you don't know from whom<br />you're receiving. So the packet itself has to include the crypto -- the security<br />sufficiently to do the end-to-end encryption because it's not as linear and dramatic<br />as a circuit-based system. So that's the security issue. The quality-of-service<br />issue, I already talked about. Those are the three that I think are the important<br />ones.<br /><br />Yeah?<br /><br />Q: You talked about DoD being a major user. Can you give some sense of where DoD<br />stacks up in the world of Internet use?<br /><br />Stenbit: Our doing this successfully will accelerate, I believe, this particular<br />process a little bit, but the people that want to make their money on IP 6 are<br />probably happy with this and -- at the margin.<br /><br />Q: How would you measure or quantify DoD's use of Internet services?<br /><br />Stenbit: We're not -- we are neither a large user of the bandwidth or the number of<br />nodes. And you're talking about the regular Internet when you're doing this. I mean,<br />the real issue is we have intranets, which are interior nets, that operate on<br />exactly -- I mean, we buy Cisco routers that are the same as the Internet providers<br />buy Cisco routers. I'm really talking about what we're going to do on our intranet,<br />some of which today are not nets, they're --<br /><br />Q: This all really refers to what you're going to do on your intranets.<br /><br />Stenbit: Yes. But it affects how we interface with the Internet, as well.<br /><br />All right. If there's no more questions, we'll bring it to a close. Thank you very<br />much.<br /><br />Q: Thank you.<br /><br />Q: Do you have any tutorials that you recommend to anybody for sort of brushing up<br />on this basic issue?<br /><br />Stenbit: Deal with Ken. He'll direct you to things that might be helpful.<br /><br />Staff: There are any number of IP 6 tutorials available on the Internet. Copyright ©<br />2003 by Federal News Service Inc., Ste. 220, 1919 M St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20036<br />USA. Federal News Service is a private firm not affiliated with the federal<br />government. No portion of this transcript may be copied, sold or retransmitted<br />without the written authority of Federal News Service Inc. Copyright is not claimed<br />as to any part of the original work prepared by a U.S. government officer or<br />employee as a part of that person's official duties. 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