The National Security Agency (NSA) is a military support agency with a significant requirement to deliver timely, relevant information to the warfighter in a secure manner. In these austere budget times, the Department of Defense (DoD) can no longer afford to build and operate its own private networks to support this requirement. The Global Grid project is a Fitting vehicle for researching those areas that NSA has identified as critical in enabling public networks to satisfy its information delivery requirement: asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) interoperability, distributed computing, information security (INFOSEC), and high-speed network connections.