US Air Force scares up $75.5M for ad-hoc missile silo network

The US Air Force has awarded a contract to build a massive 25,000 square mile mobile ad-hoc network spanning the region of the Great Plains that houses the country's fleet of intercontinental ballistic missile silos. The $75.5 million contract was granted to New York-based Persistent Systems, which manufactures hardware for …

[Kev99]

Wouldn't it have been cheaper to just go to CDW and buy up a thousand miles of Cat 6 cable and string it themselves?

[MatthewSt]

Probably, but your roving vehicles would have to make sure not to cross over each other too often

[Lazlo Woodbine]

And a switch to repeat the signal every 100 metres...

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

My first thought was "oh, like the way they did speed cameras last time I was in Norway?"*

There would be many more camera boxes than actual cameras, and the cameras were randomly rotated through the boxes. You took your chances as to whether the detector site you just drove through had a camera in it that day/week/whatever.

Maybe that's completely wide of the mark, but it's a fun thought.

* It was almost 20 years ago so I have no idea whether it's still done that way, and even whether it was more widespread than the county I was in at the time.

[rtharrison]

Sounds very similar in concept to the series of memorandums published by The RAND Corporation, ON DISTRIBUTED COMMUNICATIONS dated August 1964 by Paul Baran et al.

[Death Boffin]

Packet Radio

Seems like they are reinventing packet radio from the 80s. I don't see any technological advancement here.

[Tubz]

Why didn't they ask his Muskyness to deploy some Starlinks cheap ?