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Linux Secure Enough For The Army
LordPixie writes " As summarized over at Defense Tech, the U.S. Army is soon to be infected with the infamous OSS virus. They have chosen Linux as the operating system for the abysmally named 'System of Systems Common Operating Environment,' a part of Army's planned Future Combat Systems."
The term "system of systems" refers to the fact that FCS is meant to allow the army to be able to reconfigure things easily and rapidly to allow the technology to be used for a wide range of missions. Yeah, it sounds a bit strange if you're not used to the terminology but they do pick these phrases, acronyms, and words for a reason. You can read more about FCS here. Basically, the idea is to use a collection of smaller, more manueverable vehicles (including tanks, guns, as well as unmanned ground and aerial vehicles) to accomplish a wide array of military missions. FCS will lack the heavy armor (e.g., 70 ton tanks) that we currently have which could make the force more susceptible to destruction. The advantage of using a lighter force, however, is that it doesn't take them so long to set up, they can move pretty quickly, and don't require as much support equipment and supplies (e.g., fuel). The army plans to make the lighter FCS unit survivable through a lot of fancy communication and data-sharing technologies. So the fact that they have decided to choose Linux is reasonably signficant. FCS will rely very heavily on the quality of their software.
GMD
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