Navy seeks more control of its expansive computer network.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Information Technology

NORFOLK, Va. --The U.S. Navy owns the world's largest "purpose built" network.

The Navy/Marine Corps Intranet--NMCI--is bigger than anything the Army operates, or the Air Force. Or even the Defense Department.

It is second only to the Internet itself in terms of scale.

Now, the Navy has plans to make it even bigger.

"The resources look to be declining and all the security needs and the appetite keeps increasing," said Brian Broene, the Navy's deputy director of network operations. "We want to be better able to command and control our networks."

Some 700,000 sailors, marines and civilians spread out across the United States, Japan and Puerto Rico rely on the Navy's intranet every day.

The service is in the beginning stages of a program that will add its overseas land-based users to the network while allowing it to take more day-to-day control of the system from its contractors. The Navy hopes to complete the Next Generation Enterprise Network in the 2016 time frame, although that date is not set in stone.

What the Navy has now is the envy of the other services. In the late 1990s, it had thousands of stove-piped nodes. Naval Supply Systems Command, for example, ran its own network. Naval Air Systems Command did as well. There were some networks that existed in only one building. Others connected to the Web through local Internet service providers. The fragmentation meant the Navy did not have a handle on how much money it spent on its information technology infrastructure. It couldn't enforce security measures across the domains and it posed a barrier to the increasingly important trend toward net-centric operations, where the four services could share information more seamlessly.

Navy leadership came to the realization that it had "no command and control over its command and control," said Broene.

The process to bring it all together under one virtual roof began in 2000 and was largely completed by 2006.

The NMCI program provides IT services to about 2,000 locations in the United States, Puerto Rico and Japan. That includes 400,000 "seats," which is IT-parlance for any device that is a portal to the network, including BlackBerries, wireless PC cards, laptops and desktops.

That comes to more than 33 million emails per week and 595 million browser transactions per day for a total of 10 terabytes of data traveling over the network per day. And that is just the land-based users. The service has two other programs for overseas bases and ships at...