michael.t.howard1@us.army.mil

Contact Mike Howard at SPAWAR Charleston, he will be the one instantiating this idea that came of last weeks meetings.

Major Neushul is spot on. The U.S. Marine Corps and the DoD as a whole has very intelligent methods by which we protect our data. For those that read this blog, I suggest you do some googling on Suite A and Suite B algorithms, comsec, and transec. Given that a large portion of our "data" flows across email, running on microsoft exchange (another huge error of our ways (security, 50 MB inbox etc.)) (Hey look i double nested a comment), you have to suppose that in that particular medium for transmitting data, our enemies are running exchange as well, likely 2007 and not 2003 (HA!), but this aside. The speak of open source code obviously will have very minor limitations to opening it up to some kid in his mom's basement with a Star Trek fetish that watches "Wargames" twice a week. We are going to establish a GForge site that is PKI enabled, and will keep the vast number of monkey code warriors out of our code. This being said, a great deal of our code should be opened to the general public. The use of JBOSS for example as an ESB is no huge secret. The development of a SOA stack to present user defined operational pictures for Blue Force Tracking, Logistics, Force protection, and Fires for example is no big secret and the development of the tools, portlets, widgets, etc, are no big secret. We will be doing this and are developing to Web 2.0 and Web 2.0+ standards right now. We have development efforts underway to leverage the open source community right now. We will succeed because Marines like Major Neushul and myself are going to lead the charge! Currently, some of our most secret data exchange mechanisms are using W3C standards, and open source code. But ha ha, you can't see them nor will you ever. The beauty of the development is within the eyes of the beholder and we see great things in our military future for Open Source software development. Some of it you all may see, some of it you may not. Some of it will be Open Source in a public domain, some of it in a government only domain. Currently I can name 10 organizations in DoD working on SOA and exposing data. Do you think they talk? Hell no!!! Do you think we are wasting tax payer money on this crap, Hell Yes!!! Do you think we don't recognize it and aren't trying to change it? Think again.

The Agility, is the Capability!!!

Semper Fi,