The demonstration shows the content and style of material on the Australian Defence Organisation's World Wide Web home page. Examples are given of early web page design, for the department and Minister for Defence. Examples of web pages for military operations conducted with other nation's defence forces are shown. The use of the web to "bootstrap" an information service is shown. The latest policy documents on Internet and web use, from the Defence Corporate Information program are discussed.
Australian Defence Force, defense, Internet, web, information technology, policy, Australia.
Note: This is a brief summary for a demonstration, not a full formal paper. The demonstration is available on the web at: http://www.defence.gov.au/dcip/document/dodwebs.htm
In his paper for this conference, Brigadier Swan detailed (Swan 1998) how effective information technology is an integral part of Australia's military preparedness. In a brief on-line demonstration I would like to show you some of how the Australian Department of Defence is using the Internet, the World Wide Web and intranet technology to carry out its mission (Defence 1998).
To Promote the Security of Australia, and to Protect its People and its Interests
One way Australian Defence is bringing a corporate view to the use of IT across the organisation is to exploit the standardisation brought about by the Internet and the web. New defence projects, such as the Canberra Region Information Systems Precinct (CRISP) are making extensive use of these technologies.
Internet technology creates a challenge for security in a military environment. However, it also provides greatly enhanced facilities, both within one organisation and between organisations. The examples I will be showing you are, of necessity, unclassified public web pages. However, the same techniques can and are being used for more sensitive information on intranet systems. The potential of these techniques for connecting together systems securely for combined operations between nations has yet to be realised.
The Defence Home Page was launched on 2 March 1995. It was authorised for release by the then Director General Information Management and Communications Engineering, Brigadier Horne. The page was created as part of an initiative by the Commonwealth Internet Reference Group, using a proactive process , which is somewhat unusual for a bureaucratic organisation (Worthington 1995).
The Defence Home Page is intended to provide unclassified, non-sensitive information to the general public. It contains information about Defence's structure, military and civilian recruitment, industry policy (particularly IT policy) and general public relations information, such as media releases.
There are also home pages for the Minister for Defence and the Minister for Defence Industry, Science and Personnel. These contain photos and biographies of the ministers, media releases and speeches.
The Defence Home Page operates under a set of short, common sense guidelines (DoD 1995). These were based on the US DoD guidelines (US DoD 1995) and are currently being revised based on the latest US guidelines (US DoD 1997).
In addition to guidelines on web content, there are more detailed instructions on access to and use of the Internet, by defence personnel (Defence 1996). The guidelines attempt to balance the need for flexible and interesting information delivery as against the need for authority and security of defence information.
The Defence web pages receive approximately 2,000 "Hits" (file accesses) per day. As with other Australian web pages, approximately half of the readers are from the Australian domain (.AU) and half from other domains.
The Defence home page fits in a hierarchy below the Australian Commonwealth Government Entry Point (NLA 1998) and above the pages for Navy, Army, Air Force and other Defence programs. It should be possible to follow links from the entry point down to any Defence web page and from any leaf in the hierarchy back up the Commonwealth home page.
Pages are submitted for indexing by public Web crawlers and by the Australian Government Search Engine (NLAb 1998).
Exercise Kangaroo 95 (K95 1995) took place in an area of over 4 million km square, across the Top End of Australia and involved over 17,000 Australian Defence Force troops, and visiting units from the USA, Malaysia, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, the UK and Indonesia.
As part of the Kangaroo series the Directorate of Public Relations placed personnel in the field to prepare public information on the exercise. For 1995 Defence provided reports from the exercise via the Internet. Robert Lester, Information Systems Manager for DPR, transmitted reports and photographs from the exercise area via the Defence data network (K95a 1995).
Reports were received at Defence headquarters in Canberra and up-loaded by the author, as (then) Defence Web Master, to a publicly accessible Internet server at the Australian Defence Force Academy.
The first report confirmed sighting of Orange force was issued 29 July. The first photo, of the 16th Air Defence Regiment deploying Rapier Surface to Air Missiles, was sent 1 August. The last report Incidents in the Joint Force Area of Operations, was issued 24 August. In all, ten reports were issued.
This may be the first time a military exercise has been reported direct via the Internet. The home page has background material on the exercise, plus the daily reports and photos. In addition there was a link to the daily weather report for the area, from the Bureau of Meteorology and daily satellite image courtesy of the University of Wollongong and James Cook University.
During the exercise the Department of Administrative Services announced trucking tenders for the exercise on the Government Electronic Marketplace Service. GEMS was linked to the K'95 home page, providing an early demonstration of the potential of electronic commerce. Defence now uses the Transigo service, which replaced GEMS, to provide the government purchasing and disposals gazette online (Telstra 1998).
The K'95 Web pages had an average of 715 "hits" per day during the period of the exercise. The digital photos were also down loaded and used by the press, as well as being viewed directly on-screen.
The 1st Media Support Unit (1MSU) used two stand-alone portable satellite communications terminals to transmit reports and photographs back to Canberra. Units similar to these have been used by the 1MSU in Somalia and Rwanda.
"Commercial off the shelf" lap top computers and Internet software were used. Photos were processed for efficient on-screen display (640 x 480 pixels, 24 bit colour with "de-speckle" resulting in a file of under 50Kbytes), but also proved useable for printed reproduction.
For the first week of the exercise, the author was officially on holiday, but maintained the K95 home page remotely using a pocket modem and lap top PC from Mallacoota, Victoria.
Exercise Tandem Thrust 97 was a U.S. Pacific Command sponsored exercise in Central Queensland in March 1997, to test the capability of Australian and U.S. command and control procedures (DoD 1997). The exercise included the use of Internet e-mail and web servers for military communications (Worthington 1997).
Public web pages were created for the exercise by US and Australia personnel. The web page presentations were co-ordinated via the Internet by Australian personnel located in Canberra, North Queensland and US personnel in the Pacific at shore bases and at sea in the exercise task force.
The Internet and its latest manifestation, the web have demonstrated their utility for the presentation of Defence information to the general public. This also points the way to the use of internet technology for the more demanding task of Command and Control of military forces.
Defence (1996) Use Of The Internet By Defence Personnel, URL: http://www.defence.gov.au/intuse.html
Defence (1998) Australian Defence Home Page, Department of Defence, 25 May 1998, URL: http://www.defence.gov.au/
DoD (1995) Interim Guidelines for Establishing a WEB Information Service, Department of Defence, URL: http://www.defence.gov.au/aboutgd1.html
DoD (1997) Exercise Exercise Tandem Thrust 97 Home Page, Department of Defence 1997, URL: http://www.defence.gov.au/tt97/bckgrnd.htm
K95 (1995) Exercise Kangaroo 95 Home Page, Department of Defence 1995, URL: http://www.defence.gov.au/k95.html
K95a (1995) Exercise Kangaroo 95 - Post Exercise Report, Department of Defence, 13 September 1995: http://www.defence.gov.au/k95r12.html
NLA (1998) Australian Commonwealth Government Entry Point, National Library of Australia, URL: http://fed.gov.au/t_index.htm
NLAb (1998) Australian Government Search Engine, URL: http://search.fed.gov.au/search/
Swan M. A. (1998) Regional Co-operation in Defence IT, Department of Defence, for SEARCC98, 8 July 1998, URL: http://www.defence.gov.au/dcip/document/regit.htm
Telstra (1998) Telstra Transigo (TM) - Home Page, URL: http://www.transigo.net.au
US DoD (1995) Guidelines for Establishing and Maintaining a Department of Defense Web Information Service, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs), URL: http://www.defenselink.mil/webguide.html
US DoD (1997) Policy for Establishing And Maintaining A Publicly Accessible Department Of Defense Web Information Service, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Department of Defense, United States of America: URL: http://www.defenselink.mil/policy97.html
Worthington T. (1995) Internet in Government - for IT Practitioners, AUUG Sixth Annual Canberra Conference,15 February 1995 URL: http://www.tomw.net.au/auugpa.htm
Worthington T. (1997) Internet for C3I at Exercise Tandem Thrust 97 - ADFA Computer Science School Seminar, 10 April 1997, URL: http://www.acs.org.au/president/1997/travel/tt97/adfasem.htm
The author wishes to thank Bob Lester, Defence Web Master, for his assistance with the web pages presented. A hypertext version of this document is available at: http://www.defence.gov.au/dcip/document/dodwebs.htm
Commonwealth of Australia (c) 1998. The authors assign to ACS and educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to ACS to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the SEARCC'98 conference papers, and for the documents to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the authors.