Strategic model for the Army National Guard network transformation

Defense AR Journal, Dec, 2007 by Robert E. Banks, Clayton Duncan

In technology, there are definitions of how things operate, such as Ohm's Law for voltage across a component, and Kirchhoff's Laws for current in a circuit. Additionally, so called "laws" ingrained in mainstream culture aren't really laws at all. Instead, they are folksy rules of thumb. For example, Murphy's Law (first uttered in 1949) said that, "If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it."

One question raised by these rules-of-thumb is the "legitimacy" status. Do these laws merely describe reality or do they create it? Some of these so called rule-of-thumb "laws" have stood out by driving today's technology changes (Ross, n.d.). Present network implementations have not paid sufficient attention to the engineering laws and their combined beneficial or detrimental influences on network modernizations. The most significant of changes applicable to IT and network modernizations are changes in capability, bandwidth, and value as alluded to by these three laws (strategic drivers):

1. Moore's--The number of transistors on a chip doubles annually.

2. Nielsen's--Internet connection speed will grow by 50 percent per year.

3. Metcalfe's--A network's value grows proportionately to the number of its users squared.

MOORE'S LAW

Often referred to as the mother of all "engineering laws/rules of thumb," Moore's Law was suggested in a 1965 Intel Corporation paper (Moore, 1965). Today, this law is integrated into the "road map" of many industries, and is used as a measurement bar to assess corporate achievement. It was Carver Mead of California Institute of Technology, not Moore, who dubbed this rule a "law" many years after Moore's initial paper.

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Clearly, Moore's Law drives technology's pace. This implies that DoD acquisition programs and technical strategies must be structured to leverage Moore's Law as a driver (Department of Defense, DoDD 5000-1, May 12, 2003). Processing power, measured in millions of instructions per second (MIPS), has steadily risen because of increased transistor counts. Figure 2 characterizes this chip-doubling in performance terms, which has impacted IT servers, routers, and switches. Applying this law is equivalent to a requirement for an approximately 60 percent average annual growth in an organization's IT equipment capability. The second- and third-order effects certainly influence an organization's acquisition strategies and procurement plans.

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NIELSEN'S LAW

Nielsen's Law deals with bandwidth growth within the Internet. In 1998, Jakob Nielsen, an Internet usability expert, predicted that a high-end user's Internet connection speed will grow by 50 percent per year (Nielsen, April 5, 1998). This law impacts the Services roll-out pace. Figure 3 shows 2001 full T-1 (1,544,000 bps) bandwidth upgrades for GWOT support were surpassed in the following year. Bandwidth available to the user will remain a gating factor in the Internet speed and quality experience, so what's the organization's acquisition plan for bandwidth growth?