The U.S. military is undertaking to centralize management of its network security and operations in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines through the new office of the Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations (JTF-GNO). Heading the effort is Lt. GeneralHarry Raduege, who recently spoke with Network World Senior Editor Ellen Messmer about why the Department of Defense needs to better coordinate across the services to protect the military's network - sometimes referred to as the Global Information Grid - across 65 nations.

Since November, the JTF-GNO has served as the military's central point of authority regarding networks. What's the thinking here?

It's a matter of evolution and what we've learned is that if in fact we are going to manage, operate and defend the Global Information Grid (GIG), we have to do that in a collaborative, policy-driven manner. So we are establishing technical and legal policies, such as those for incident handling, and we are going to be coordinating those policies with all the defense partners. We will get ideas from vendors but we'll coordinate with military services, combat commands, Defense Information Systems Agency and the intelligence community. It allows us to direct changes throughout the GIG 24 hours a day to the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

Are IP-based networks in use in combat now to control weapons systems?

Yes, it's net-centric warfare. If somebody gets into our system or causes a denial-of-service attack, that's of critical importance. But the DoD is setting up so we can defend ourselves against the havoc. We are taking a different approach now, such as having rules for specific DoD ports and protocols, so we 'deny by default' and we make real-time decisions to close ports under attack. Last year alone, we had over 60,000 attempted intrusions against our unclassified networks. That's 150-plus attempts per day.

What role does the JTF-GNO play?

Discussion topics are our concept of operation, organization structure, tactics, technologies and procedures. This is allowing us through the component commands to exercise new discipline across the GIG. If we can collaborate and coordinate with each other on best practices and best types of detection equipment or network management, for example, it would be for the better of the Department of Defense. And wouldn't it be nice for some type of enterprise purchases? It would mean we could have better interoperability across the DoD.