DOD reinforces 'virtual Pentagon'

Soon after the Pentagon was attacked Sept. 11, officials quickly realized that they needed to re-examine the contingency plans they had in place.

Once dubbed the "virtual Pentagon" or the "distributed Pentagon," the effort — now called the Command Communications Survivability Project to better reflect its purpose — remains largely unchanged, said Tom Kupiek, project manager for the initiative.

Defense Department officials have said that the terrorist attacks were a wake-up call and spurred a significant redesign of DOD's information technology contingency plans. The plans were updated before the Year 2000 date change but did not go far enough, they said.

After Sept. 11, many people realized that their data was vulnerable despite fixes and backups. Among the problems DOD encountered was a computing environment with numerous single points of failure — applications or databases that, if removed, could not be recovered and critical network links that, if down, could not be worked around.

The Army, for example, lost a significant amount of budget data when the Sept. 11 attacks destroyed part of the Pentagon.

The Command Communications Survivability Project will bring about considerable changes, such as creating redundancies, with backup sites located away from the Pentagon so that a backup network would be ready if the main network went down.

The project is linked to the reconstruction of the Pentagon and, in fact, falls under the responsibility of the organization that is overseeing the rebuilding.

Kupiek called the changes to the Pentagon's contingency plans "extensive." There is a team working on the initiative six days a week that focuses on logistics, designs and plans. "This will continue for some time," he said.

"The previous Pentagon contingency plans were built to support extensive catastrophic events," Kupiek said. "The new plans incorporate lessons learned from the [Sept. 11] events and the system shortfalls that became evident during the crisis. The [Command Communications Survivability Project] will mitigate threats and create a response system that is not bound by brick and mortar."

DOD officials expect to complete the project within 12 months to 48 months, depending on the progress of each phase, Kupiek said. He would not go into detail about the phases, however, because that is sensitive information.

But he said that the plans cover wide-ranging issues.

"We are working on all aspects, very similar to the Pentagon renovation efforts to date, incorporating information technology systems, power, environmental controls, physical and other types of security," he said.