Although the military is more dependent on cyberspace than ever, it's too soon to abandon familiarity with manual processes, said Army Maj. Gen. Michael  Jones, Central Command director of operations.

"It's good that our folks still know how to read a manual paper map, that they're not completely reliant on GPS" and know how to still manually plot artillery fire, Jones said while speaking May 12 on a panel at the AFCEA International Joint Warfighting Conference in Virginia Beach, Va.

It took four decades for cavalry officers to feel confident enough in their side arms before they would go out without their saber, Jones said. As late as 1913, the Army still taught swordsmanship, he added.

"It can take a long time for this to develop where you have enough dependability, redundancy, backup systems in the automated world that you no longer have to worry about these things," Jones said.

However, said Rob Carey, the Department of the Navy chief information officer, the military has become irrevocably network dependent.

"The ability to put ordnance on target with precisions is geared around information that's real time to the commander," Carey said. If the military network were to somehow become unavailable, the most important response would be in mending it to the point where real time information can flow again, he said.

The Navy had a small taste of network failure when floods earlier in May disabled two large data centers in the Naval Support Activity Mid-South in Millington, Tenn. The Navy was able to restore the functions those data centers provided, Carey said, but "it went a little slower than we would have liked."

All military services are in the midst of a network consolidation effort; the Navy is working toward a state of operations outlined in its Naval Network Environment 2016 paper.

"Will we get to one [network]? No. My goal is that we might get to two or three--afloat, ashore, garrison, what have you," Carey said.

For more:
- view a video recording of the AFCEA International Joint Warfighting 2010 conference panel

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