Rick Kozak / Staff Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege (ret.) is considered one of the nation’s top experts on defense networking.

Chief information officers should aggressively manage information, not just infrastructure, a retired U.S. Air Force general considered one of the nation’s top experts on defense networking said today.

Speaking at the 6th annual C4ISR Integration conference in Arlington, Va., Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege (ret.) said their goal should be a concept he called “ubiquitous access to information,” in which any authorized person” should have access to the Global Information Grid anywhere in the world.

“The dream is coming to fruition today,” he said. “The net-centricity concepts we first received in bare bones format back in 1991 have meat on them today.”

To illustrate his point, Raduege said that in 1991, the more than 500,000 U.S. service members deployed for Operation Desert Storm had access to a total of 92 megabytes of communications bandwidth. But in 2003, at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a force only 40 percent as large had 40 times more bandwidth – more than 3,200 gigabytes in total.

Still, the need for fast, accurate information can only increase, he said, and it’s no longer a case of making due with whatever data is available. “We want to pull information from the edge – it’s no longer just a question of ‘push’.”

Realizing that goal is going to require a doctrinal foundation, Raduege said, a foundation he has distilled down to the “five pillars of netcentricity:” communications infrastructure, security and privacy, information management, organization and governance, and people and leadership. “We’ve reached the age of interdependence and have to depend upon each other more and more,” he said.

Return to news coverage