RSS and the Military

Wonder why the military doesn't get the web? Maybe because the average destroyer shares a 30kbps internet connection among 200 people -- for two hours a day. Even aircraft carriers give Internet performance that would be abysmal for a 28.8 modem (with 90% of the crew excluded from the internet).

The answer in the past has been very expensive monolithic systems which milk every drop of bandwidth. There are some real challenges -- much higher latency and packet loss than the average Cisco router is accustomed to -- due to sandstorms and sea state. The problem with monolithic systems is that they're great for things like intelligence (high demand, lots of money) but terrible for things like knowledge sharing (rapidly changing requirements; leverage commercial best practices).

In less than a year, the military could double its effective bandwidth to its most disadvantaged platforms if it adopted RSS. And provide the entire crew every drop of information which was downloaded, instead of just a select few. The reason why is that the creation of metafeeds and feed subscription would allow units to precisely tailor and prioritize the information received. Also, the implementation of a specialized RSS proxy would increase efficiency by an order of magnitude over HTML proxies. The reason why is that an RSS proxy can use the metadata of a webfeed (and the usage model) to make smart choices about information acquisition and retention.

This is a paper which describes my proposal for military-specific extensions to RSS and the implementation of RSS proxies for low bandwidth environments. It was written for my class in "IT and Warfare" at the Naval War College, which I attend as a reservist. Your thoughts are appreciated -- better yet, I'm looking for people interested in implementation since it is well within the scope of a minor software R&D project at any number of government software labs. Rarely does the military have the opportunity to get ahead of an emerging standard and make a meaningful contribution back to the community in this fashion.

Comments

[Matt]

Fascinating paper! I have been thinking about using RSS feeds to represent Common Operational Pictures.

[Dervin]

John,
I believe you are right on the money with this paper. I would like to further discuss a product that my team and I are currently developing. Please feel free to contact me via email.

[Jose Rivas]

John, I sent you an email...as I stated this is something I wish would catch on...there's no question this feed would prove beneficial for all concerned.