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Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and a Pentagon consultant on the war net, said he wondered if the military's dream was realistic. "I want to make sure what we realize is vision and not hallucination," Mr. Cerf said.

"This is sort of like Star Wars, where the policy was, 'Let's go out and build this system,' and technology lagged far behind,'' he said. "There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals. You just need to temper them with physics and reality."

Advocates say networked computers will be the most powerful weapon in the American arsenal. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence and soldiers in a globe-girdling network - what they call net-centric warfare - will, they say, change the military in the way the Internet has changed business and culture.

"Possibly the single most transforming thing in our force,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, "will not be a weapons system, but a set of interconnections."

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