Singapore, U.S. Have Common C4I Goals
By GOPAL RATNAM, SINGAPORE
The U.S. military is investing in C4I while Singapore is putting money into IKC2, but despite the differences in terminology, the world’s superpower and South East Asia’s economic powerhouse are aiming for the same goal: armed forces that depend on fast-flowing information to neutralize threats.
Singapore is spending up to 1 percent of its defense budget to experiment and steer its military’s transformation, Army Brig. Gen. Jimmy Khoo, head of the Future Systems Directorate for the Singapore Armed Forces, said here Feb. 23. Singapore spends roughly 5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defense. This puts military spending by the city-state, using 2002 GDP figures, the most recent provided by the government, at $7.7 billion.
The Integrated Knowledge-based Command and Control (IKC2) program is the framework for network and sensor technologies being developed in this island nation, Khoo said.
Singapore is drawing inspiration and lessons from recent U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, where America’s C4I systems played a decisive role.
Khoo spoke at the C4I Asia Conference 2004, which brought together leading international experts in the field of command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I). The event followed the Asia Pacific Security Conference 2004.
Also speaking at the C4I Asia Conference, John Stenbit, assistant secretary of defense and chief information officer of the U.S. Department of Defense, said the Pentagon is working hard to reduce the cost of bandwidth, or channels that carry information to and from the battlefield.
While the U.S. military has made huge advances in information processing and storage, bandwidth constraints continue to hobble faster information flow, Stenbit said.
The Pentagon is investing up to $15 billion to make bandwidth cheap, he said. Once that goal is reached, U.S. forces would migrate to an information system modeled on the Internet — one where soldiers on the field can fashion the type of information they need, he said.
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