The Internet and the Military: Licklider's "Great Intergalactic Network

Computer history buffs consider Lick one of the most important personalities in the development of computer science and the Internet... The truth is a bit stickier. Lick’s job was to develop the underlying computer and networking technology necessary to fight modern wars... For instance, documents show that in March 1962, he attended an influential US Army symposium that convened in Washington, DC, to discuss how behavioral science and computer technology could be used to better wage “limited war” and counterinsurgency. There, Lick was part of a working group dedicated to crafting a US Army counterinsurgency research program that could meet a “multidimensional Communist challenge—in paramilitary warfare, in psychological warfare, and in the conventional and nuclear field.” ...Fundamentally, his vision for a distributed interactive computing network is not very different from what the Internet looks like today..." (Levine, 2018)