ARPANET was the precursor to the internet, with MILNET being the portion dedicated to US military data transmission. MILNET split from ARPANET in 1983, taking 65 nodes for better security. MILNET later split into NIPRNET, SIPRNET, and JWICS. MILNET is now part of NIPRNET, used for exchanging sensitive but not classified data.
MILNET (Military Network) was the acronym given to that portion of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) assigned to unclassified US Department of Defense traffic. ARPANET was the name given to the computer network topography that would eventually become what is now popularly known as the Internet. In 1983, ARPANET and MILNET were split so that henceforth the former would be dedicated to academic research while the latter would be used for US military data transmission. The system that dictates the attribution of domain names to websites – the Domain Name System (DNS) – has assigned the top-level domain (TLD).mil for use by the US military.
The provenance of today’s Internet lies in what was in its early stages a research project that researchers have titled ARPANET; this network was originally a scaled-down version of the massive interconnected network we know today as The Net. In 1969, the ARPANET network connected the universities of California, Stanford, and Utah and involved simply switching data packets around these sites, or nodes .
In 1983, there were 113 nodes, or connection points, on the ARPANET. Following the ARPANET/MILNET split, however, the MILNET portion of the network seized 65 nodes that it would have dedicated to military data and could have better safeguarded. This left the ARPANET with 68 nodes. The ARPANET and MILNET networks maintained a number of connection points, known as gateways, but these were few and easily decoupled, giving the MILNET network a measure of security that could be invoked if the network was attacked or compromised.
As the potential for massive interconnection was realized in the advancements that saw the advent of the Internet, even military agencies were aware of MILNET’s potential. Initially providing Internet Protocol (IP) connectivity between various U.S. military bases at home and abroad, the MILNET split again in the 1990s into several networks that are now known as the Non-Classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNET ), the Secret, formerly secure, Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNET) and Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS).
Today what was known as the MILNET network has been included by the Defense Data Network (DDN), and the section that was once known as MILNET is now known as NIPRNET, the network that the US military uses to exchange sensitive data but not classified among internal users.
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