WASHINGTON — A new Pentagon office unveiled this week will try to build a communications network for military, intelligence and space agencies based on a single architecture, Department of Defense officials said.

The Defense Department's Transformational Communications Office is at the leading edge of a Pentagon effort to transform the way it conducts military operations. The Air Force-led initiative will create a new National Space Program Architecture that would attempt to tie together space-based and ground networks. It would also seek to meet the military's growing demand for bandwidth.

"The mission of this office is to assure that we have communications compatibility across the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and NASA," said Peter Teets, director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and Air Force undersecretary. "Compatibility is critical to meeting the growing communications requirements that we face and to provide the flexibility we need to meet evolving demands on our communication systems."

Rear Adm. Rand Fisher, director of NRO's communications office, will head the new Pentagon communications agency.

Demand for bandwidth

The communications overhaul is being driven partly by growing demand for bandwidth as the military deploys new sensors, like unmanned spy drones, capable of delivering steaming video of the battlefield in near-real time. Predator and Global Hawk aircraft have been used extensively over Afghanistan in recent months.

Program officials said a joint integrated communications network tying together all U.S. space and ground assets would include both laser and RF communications capabilities. The military has used wideband laser communications for terrestrial networks but has yet to develop a satellite capability. Teets said the new office would track laser communications technology and eventually conduct technology demonstrations of satellite laser communications.

A new network architecture providing compatible communications to the far-flung national security establishment "could increase our capabilities by a factor of 10," Teets said.

The military has long faced compatibility issues because different military services and U.S. agencies have relied on separate networks, protocols and different equipment. Interoperability has been an even larger problem for the Pentagon and its NATO allies.

Some observers questioned whether the new office would be able to merge secretive cultures of the spy agencies and NRO, which builds and operates U.S. spy satellites, with the military services and NASA, which often rely on commercial networks. Teets acknowledged the current communications architecture is "a system that has a lot of pipes," noting, though, that the new office would ensure that "all those pipes connect to the war fighter and that the war fighter can get on-demand service from the communication system."

Decisions about how to implement the new network architecture must be made soon, program officials said. For example, the office must decide by the end of 2004 whether to order two additional Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellites or move to an upgraded capability.

At the same time, network architects will have to determine how to integrate billions of dollars worth of military satellite communications hardware into a new, integrated network. "All of these existing legacy systems need to be brought along in a way that they're phased into the new transformational architecture in a smooth, compatible way and that none of the war fighters are left behind in the process," Teets said.

The transformation plan calls for transitioning from the military's "channelized" communications system to using packet switching and Internet protocols, as well as specified network protocols designed to synchronize the overall network. Under the plan, the new Pentagon office would generate new specifications for network elements like protocols, and the military services and intelligence and space agencies would purchase new equipment using their own acquisition budgets, program officials said.

"What this office is going to do is take a comprehensive look at all of the pieces, which includes the legacy, and then develop an architecture," said Fisher. "Out of that architecture will fall out, in time, systems that will be phased out and those that aren't."

"We haven't made any decisions" yet, he added.