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Re: DARPA get's it right this time, takes aim at IT sacred cows

2004-03-15 13:50:20
jfcm wrote:
Interesting as this matches the conclusions of our own meetings in Dec/Jan
on national vulnerability to internet.

Sounds like the internet is a threat, not a tool. (Ok, I know you're not a native English speaker, but it was hard to resist.)

Agreed. But for a non US observer this sounds in line with the pro-IPv6
stance of DoD: obeying http://whitehouse.gov/pcipb marching orders.

To be fair, it was NATO and the Allies who started in the v6 direction first. DoD is just merely keeping up with its various international partners.

May be am I candid, but I tend to think that when a military person speaks,
it is with a purpose. And usually that telling what you exactly want is the
best way to obtain it. The article does not say they want to kill IP, but
that they want solutions. There are three possibilities to support changes:

- to fix IP
- to change IP
- to replace IP

Generally speaking, military officers do speak with a purpose in mind, but I disagree that the thrust you're enumerating. "Fix IP" is probably true, "Change IP" fits with "Fix IP", but "Replace IP" is patently untrue. After all, the DoD spent a lot of time and money on ATM in the mid and late 90's only to fall back to IP. ATM was an abject failure.

I read they have identified a need (the same as NSI said they had a need
through PathFinder) and that the ball is in the IAB and IETF's field (for a
short while if you consider how long NSI awaited before suing ICANN)

I'm not sure I agree with this at all -- the research community is much more agile than the IETF and IAB, so it's more likely that the IETF will play catch-up as the DARPA reearch produces tangible results.

Let see the situation through military eyes. The battlefield is what it is.
For the new Cyber Forces, the internet battlefield is what is used
today. So they are interested in what is available/under serious
development - or in what worked before/aside the IP technology and
which could be deployed quick (so, most probably a total change for
a clean sheet, low cost and confidential restart).

The emphasis is and has been "network centric warfare". The current DARPA director is interested in a good mix of solutions that can be deployed in the immediate, near and future terms. "Deployed" as in "deployed out in the field with the warfighter" (on the back of a US Marine.)

Throwing away the current IP infrastructure or completely redesigning the protocols would be one of those way off in the future projects and has very little chance for success (refer to the DoD and ATM as a good example.)

Your army combat engineer example is a fairly decent metaphor for what the proposed programs want, but throwing away IP is not a tenable solution.

May I suggest, that these guys' priority is not really to respect RFCs,
but to protect your lifes?

Protecting the warfighter's life, actually.

Real life is not monolithic. Fighting for one model against another is
a very strange idea. Would aggregating models, so they may have
some consistency (as the low layers do) and synergy, and picking the
one which works for each task at hands, not be a more pragmatic and
scientific approach?

No, real life is not monolithic, but invariant models like the 4- and 7-layer models describe real systems and relationships. This was true a few minutes ago when last I looked at mathematics and physics, and their success at describing real world phenomena.

I'm not saying the model is complete, just like physics is still looking for its TOE model. But the model isn't completely wrong, either. Augmenting the 4- and 7-layer models with what's been learned is a substanstive effort that will produce results, but somewhere, someone has to propose what's missing and what needs to be added.

May I suggest that the example is good as an image.

SMTP's problems are a better example of what's needed, not of what's wrong. I'd vehemently argue that SMTP isn't broken because it works. If one is going to replace SMTP, the replacement had better do what SMTP now does. SMTP does show its age from its origins in batch-mode processing days, but there comes a point at which "plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose" when applied to new solutions.

Why not to have a try at:

- analyzing an extended network model where the datacoms
various models and layers are encapsulated into the physical,
operational and usage layers?

So long as it stays in 3 dimensions, which is what most people can tractably handle. If it can't be easily visualized, it's not going to be successful. Also keep in mind that humans aren't particularly good at drawing 3d diagrams on paper (I'd argue that's one of the successes of the 2d layer diagrams.)

- accepting that the datacoms ecosystem needs to support many
different data and objects granularities, including the current IP
ones. And to have a try at a universal packet protocol, starting
from IP as the prevalent one, and progressively extended its
capabilities?

Well, sure, that makes sense, but I'm going to doubt that you're going to find an universal packet protocol that's any more universal than IP.

As one other responder said, there is a need to accomodate different addressing styles that separate identity from location. I agree with the sentiment. So, [erhaps it is only necessary and sufficient to extend or redefine IP's addressing?

Or perhaps it's only necessary and sufficient to design a universal application-level forwarding layer? (Warning: plug for my own research called FLAPPS, http://flapps.cs.ucla.edu/)