Rick Kozak / Staff Troy Meink is director, communications office in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration.

The Pentagon is expanding its focus from building the transport layer for the military's networks to emphasize timely delivery of data and assured availability of the network, said Troy Meink, a Pentagon official responsible for networks.

While a lot of investment has gone into developing the transport layer or the data pipes and satellite bandwidth that are essential to the Pentagon's Global Information Grid, there are "other pieces that are not so expensive to develop but no less critical to ensure that we can find, access and utilize information in a timely manner," said Meink, director, communications office in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration.

The other elements include making "sure the network is highly available and information assurance," he said, speaking at the 6th Annual C4ISR Journal Integration Conference, New Tools for War in Real Time in Arlington, Va.

Information assurance is critical because attacking U.S. military networks is an objective “for our adversaries,” he said.

Though the commercial world ensures network availability by “over providing it, we can’t do that,” he said.

Once the transport layer is in place and means to ensure timely delivery and assurance are established, the goal is to migrate the military’s network to Internet Protocol (IP)-based system, he said. In an IP-based system each node has a unique address and data can move from one point to another through different routes, depending on what’s available. But, he said, in the near future the network is likely to be circuit-based, where data travels between two points in a fixed, pre-established route.

Among the big programs that make up the Global Information Grid or GIG, the bandwidth-expansion project, the Transformational Communication Satellite or TSAT and teleports form the Tier 1 programs, he said.

Tier 2 programs include Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, or WIN-T, the Joint Tactical Radio System, or JTRS and the Wideband Gapfiller System satellites. Tier 3 programs include part of the JTRS and the Mobile User Objective System satellites.

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