The Internet during world war

The policy suggestions are fine but the reasons are kind of silly.<p>I&#x27;ve never been in a conflict zone but I&#x27;d assume securing food and water is #1. Reliable electricity access might be a distant nice to have and cell phone or wifi signal? I&#x27;m guessing that&#x27;s a no.<p>Decentralize, increase redundancy, eliminate single points of failure, sure all good.<p>But if we&#x27;re really talking about internet like communication during wars then I would assume what we need to talk about is off-grid power generation, packet radio infrastructure build outs, hardened underground storage containers for computing resources, etc. Without those you aren&#x27;t going to have a phone that turns on or connects to a tower.<p>Maybe this is a marketing play to sell things we should be doing (like community networks) to people who otherwise wouldn&#x27;t listen. If that&#x27;s the approach than best of luck

Needs to be looked at from all angles including:<p>+ Shared physical infra Trans-oceanic cables being the most fragile. However, the risk here would not immediately be of the power-food-shelter variety. Satellite-based comms will potentially add resiliency. Intra-region (depending on the region), there is less fragility (more independent fibers), and emergency tactics such as P2P mesh networks aided by swarms of drones, balloons, satellites becomes interesting.<p>+ Shared software infra Because my network talks to your network, and&#x2F;or leverages common (or at least sometimes cascading) structures like DNS, NTP, shared BGP routing tables, what risks do I have? How could I mitigate them proactively? What would I do in an emergency which wouldn&#x27;t have worse consequences (trade-offs are fine)? This category of risks can be difficult in that the events might not be obvious at first (unlike most physical infra events), but that could make it worse...

Sort of a related tangent to the &quot;the internet was designed by ARPA to survive nuclear war&quot; trope that is trotted out occasionally...<p>It&#x27;s NOT that the Internet specifically was designed or intended for this, it was a research network. The pre-existing AT&amp;T Long Lines network which carried telephone traffic around the US48 states also carried the DoD&#x27;s AUTOVON network data links for their own phone system, and data links between things like SAGE direction centers.<p>Many of the cold war era hardened AT&amp;T Long Lines bunkers, underground sites, special buried mountaintop sites and such all pre-date the earliest days of the ARPANET.<p>There&#x27;s mountain top long lines sites out there now that couldn&#x27;t be duplicated for less than $50 million. Money was thrown at this in quite a profligate manner - same as money was spent on various early generations of ICBMs, strategic air command 24x7x365 standby and patrols, the DEW line, and such.<p>In the era before inter-city singlemode fiber optic cables were a real operational reality these places were absolutely crucial.<p>The data links between sites in many cases rode on top of these networks in the earliest days of IP.

Fascinating. I think that the capacity of nuclear weapons and MAD decreased the likelihood of future world wars to so low as to be effectively none.<p>But this article kinda opens the possibility of world war taking place entirely in the data&#x2F;communications realm.

Valid points, although risks seem to depend on the scale. A worldwide conflict would have different risks than two-state conflict. I don&#x27;t see any reflection in the article or linked materials on the lessons from Ukraine, and the potential role of satellite internet in bridging localized infrastructure gaps.