The United States Navy is quietly and aggressively touting its horn on adapting a Network-Centric philosophy, one that will win them brownie points with Donald Rumsfeld and the current wave of "transformational" thinking flowing through the Pentagon. To rework the old cliche, the network is the weapon, more specifically the glue that binds together sensors and weapons, allowing warfighters to view the battlefield more precisely and apply the force necessary to achieve desired "effects." The new way of fighting is built around Internet standards, including web pages, routers, Ethernet, instant messaging, and chat rooms. Casualties appear to be both expensive customized systems and Microsoft software.

According to retired Admiral Dennis McGinn, now in private industry and an NBC analyst, the U.S. Navy has embraced the information age with more successes than failures. Presenting at the SuperNova 2003 conference, McGinn described the overhaul of fleet decision-making from a stove-piped set of legacy system using Mil-Spec CRT monitors to a quick purchase of off-the-shelf "smart boards" incorporated into a display wall (Oh, and the off-the-shelf equipment used less power and was cooler to boot). Sailors and officers, once laboring under the burden of daily PowerPoint presentations, went web-crazy, putting and updating information in real-time on a web-site and sharing the information using the Navy's secure network.