Work Progressing on Army's Future Combat Systems

El_Oscuro brings us a Washington Post update on the progress of Future Combat Systems, the U.S. Army's Linux-based operating environment that has been under development for several years. The project, which currently surpasses 63 million lines of code, has received criticism for having a scope greater than that which the Army can manage. Since the program's inception, integration of commercial applications has increased the amount of code, but has also saved the developers time and money. "Boeing and the Army said they chose not to use Microsoft's proprietary software because they didn't want to be beholden to the company. Instead, they chose to develop a Linux-based operating system based on publicly available code. Boeing's Schoen said that it is designing software so that if soldiers lose their connection, the software will automatically "heal itself," retrieving the information within seconds without rebooting."

Comments

Zombie

[Krneki]

Damn, I was looking forward to zombie soldiers.

Re:Zombie

[ILuvRamen]

it's okay, giant Linux penguin bots are almost as good. Btw did you mean "zombies" like infected Windows PC?
"General, your new Windows powered tank is rolling into battle but it keeps sending us something about Canadian pills"

Re:Zombie

[MrNiceguy_KS]

Could be worse. Much worse

[Clippy pops up, wearing Kevlar helmet]
It looks like you're under hostile fire! I can help you:
-Return fire
-Request air support
-Call a medic
-Plot a course for an orderly retreat
-Report this problem to Microsoft

And Appropriately

[AndGodSed]

Yes. It does run Linux.

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys would be appalled at the bad software that's in this thing. From a bizarrely dysfunctional display system to a completely unstable and ever changing target OS. Yes, it runs linux but Boeing has decided that linux isn't good enough and is rolling out their own operating environment that we're all forced to use.

Blecch. Blecch. Blechh.

Oh, and the whole thing hinges on futuristic radios that don't work.

Yeah, I think I've been working FCS for too long. Sigh...

Re:And Appropriately

[casi0qv]

Why put intelligence and effort into "future combat systems" when that same intelligence and effort could be used to work on preventing future combat?

Re:And Appropriately

[VON-MAN]

Damn right, and just as my linux computer here it can heal its connection withing seconds without booting! Anybody here use Windows? Loosers!!!

Now, let's read the article.

Re:And Appropriately

[dave1791]

The job of the army is not to "prevent" future combat, but to prepare for it and execute if if needed. The diplomatic job of preventing it falls to... well, diplomats and politicians.

And I hate to say it, but we do live in a Bismarkian world where military strength, like economic clout, is an asset on the scorecard of diplomatic maneuver. If you are poor and weak, nobody will listen to you. If you are rich and weak or poor and strong, people might listen. If you are rich and strong, your diplomats carry the most clout.

Re:And Appropriately

[dintech]

That doesn't involve blowing things up. Blowing things up is cool.

Re:And Appropriately

[casi0qv]

I'm not worried about our diplomats carrying insufficient clout. I am worried about the victims of our numerous pointless wars in the past and present. I do not see the world as a giant game of monopoly where we are endlessly seeking to increase our power and wealth. The world is full of people who all share a common desire to live a happy and fulfilling life, yet millions die for the pointless greedy ambitions of a few powerful men. As people gifted with technical skills we cannot let ourselves be blinded to what is going on in the world, for an opportunity to play with expensive toys and use our skills to develop weapons that kill innocent people. We cannot afford to have a frail grasp on how our actions fit into the bigger picture when a few lines of code can be part of a machine used to murder for political ambition.

Re:And Appropriately

[casi0qv]

The United States has a corrupt government, where people are lied to and brainwashed into supporting wars for the personal ambitions of a few wealthy men, not the benefit or defense of the nation. We are ALL responsible for letting this happen, and have a responsibility to stop it. Not just the corrupt diplomats and politicians, as we are electing them and allowing them to do this.

Re:And Appropriately

[kong74]

I agree with the first, that it's simply not the job of the army to prevent combat. But if "military strength, like economic clout, is an asset on the scorecard of diplomatic maneuver" maybe it's got something to do with what diplomacy is about? I mean the world is not "Bismarkian" by itself and it simply can't be true that every state is just concerned that people are listening to him. They have their causes for war and they are always prepared, because it's the same causes they have in peace, the only difference is the means. And these causes are: controlling the homeland, be the exclusive force there to use the people by law - force them to produce money. And: controlling other powers, force them to be useful for the very own money-production. It is that simple, and everybody knows about it: the main concern in every nation is "the growth" - how good does the nation produce more money with the money it has. The truth, of course, is that not the money produces the money, they just account their success by comparing money-sums. You need work under the command of capital to do growth, an that antagonism is the reason why an exclusive force is needed in the homeland ... And it gets very complicated until some diplomats are walking around on coktailpartys and testing the mood. So although the cause is very simple, it gets a complicated thing there someone might look at and just be not able to see what it is all about - like Go, very simple rules, but if you look at a game of masters in Go, it's a big riddle.

Re:And Appropriately

[casi0qv]

When did economic growth become more important than human lives? Money is a tool that humans invented to serve them, not the other way around. In fact, I think that the merits of continuous growth should be called into question. No rate of growth can be sustained forever. Here is an article from Physics Today that shows the mathematics of why growth cannot be sustained: http://fire.pppl.gov/energy_population_pt_0704.pdf

If economic growth will end eventually, and doesn't really increase our happiness why has it become a goal worth killing for?

Re:And Appropriately

[kong74]

Money is not a physical thing, it's a political, or a social thing. And that's why physical thoughts on growth don't help with your question. Second: money was not "invented", and it doesn't serve the humans. How comes the money when it was not invented? I try a very short explanation: Money is the inevitable result of a special social relation, the private property. How that comes to be the basis of every social relation, the dominant thing in what humans have to do with each other, is a question far beyond the scope of an internet-forum, it's the whole history. But the important thing to understand is that private property is not the thing that you own, but the relation to others enclosed in that you own the thing: the thing is exclusively under your command, what you want rules the thing, and that you own it excludes everybody else from using it without your accordance. Where everything is the property of someone, the individuals walk around and behave like their volitions living in the things, it's their relation to exclude each other that appears to be the things attribute to be the property of someone else. But that's not the end of the story, because humans need to exchange things, they are not stand-alone systems. And it's not at the beginning of the history, that they begin to compare different amounts of different things under one aspect: what is their value? In other words: what, of the same, are these different things? or: how much property of mine is the same as how much property of yours? Value is the extent of property, regardless of what one ones: shoes, computers, tables, etc. And these things are really the same only in one respect, and that respect becomes effective behind the consciousness of the humans: they are an amount of averaged social, abstract work (or do you say labor? - I'm not native English-speaking). This extend emerges as a result of competition, everything gets compared to everything, always interested to give as few as possible and get as much as possible. But nobody can see any amount of averaged social, abstract work, it's a social amplitude, not a physical thing. Nobody is conscious of that amplitude but everybody is interested in things owned by someone else and has only the means of what he owns himself to get these things. Everybody is interested in setting some things he owns the same as some things someone else owns. So they compare it to a third thing: weed for example. Mine is 2 weed, yours is 4 weed, I give mine for half of yours. That's the beginning of money, in very short terms. And money doesn't serve the humans, most humans know it the other way round: as prices they can't pay

Re:And Appropriately

[vbraga]

When the only thing you have is an army, all problems looks like wars.

Call me utopian, but if you - and the biggest player of our democracy game - keeps acting in a Machiavellian (or Bismarkian, as you say) our future has no space for peace. If you don't keep your ideals in sight, the only thing you're left is the (international) politics game.

Yes, I understand your pragmatism and having people like you is an asset at any negotiation. But, please, just remember that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is an unalienable rights of man, as your Declaration of Independence states, not a right of the americans, but of man. So, let the other countries do it too.

The only winning move is not to play. Not to play the Bismarkian game.

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if the Army is being shot at or bombed, why should they not consider it a war?

Re:And Appropriately

[zanybrainy941]

OK so this is based on source code licensed such that we can demand to see their source code and have access to any special software required to compile it, and they'll just hand it over, right? ... right?

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

But where are they being shot and bombed? Their own turf?

Re:And Appropriately

[somersault]

Pretty much all politicians are only in it for their personal gain, so how is voting differently going to solve anything there? It's an illusion of choice.. I hear a lot of 'republican' this, 'democrat' that, how is a choice between 2 political groups going to give you a say on specific subjects? Writing and protesting would accomplish more than voting in this situation (IMO of course)..

Re:And Appropriately

[c6gunner]

The United States has a corrupt government

As opposed to what nation? North Korea? China?

This "corrupt government" nonsense really gets to me. The US government is quite possibly one of the least corrupt governments on the planet, yet you act as if you're currently under the boot of the Fourth Reich. Give your head a shake!

Re:And Appropriately

[c6gunner]

I do not see the world as a giant game of monopoly where we are endlessly seeking to increase our power and wealth.

That's your own problem. Why should the government let your naiveté influence policy? If you want to stick your head in the dirt and ignore the rest of the world, fine, but the rest of us will go on seeking to constantly increase our knowledge, wealth, productivity, and power. Maybe you've got some metaphysical touchy-feely answer as to what the purpose of life is, but for me, and billions like me, it's achieving as much as I possibly can today, and improving as much as I possibly can tomorrow.

The world is full of people who all share a common desire to live a happy and fulfilling life, yet millions die for the pointless greedy ambitions of a few powerful men.

That's because the world is also full of people who all share a common desire to be the alpha-male, and control what everyone else does, says, reads, eats, fucks, and even thinks. And those people would put a serious hurtin' on sheep like you if you didn't have a military and police force to protect you. Whether you like it or not, it IS a dog-eat-dog world out there. Playing ostrich isn't going to change that fact.

Re:And Appropriately

[cshotton]

Be VERY afraid. FCS/SoSCOE (System of Systems Common Operating Environment) is your worst, worst nightmare. It all squats upon an antiquated CORBA infrastructure and is the most bloated, incredibly poorly engineered PoS that has ever been birthed by an aerospace contractor. And I should know. As chief architect for the Common Operating System component of DARPA's J-UCAS program, we fought Boeing long and hard over their insistence that this architecture form the basis of the J-UCAS software infrastructure. While the idea stems from the long-running quest within the DoD to develop a true cross-service network-centric software architecture, it was built by people who completely ignored the last 15 years of lessons learned about large scale distributed systems from the Internet. It has multiple single points of failure baked into the architecture, requires outrageous amounts of RAM and CPU power to run (making it incredibly unsuitable for embedded systems use), and is licensed in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to obtain and modify without Boeing's involvement.

Furthermore, Boeing has expressed in public on several occasions that they intend for SoSCOE to make them the "Microsoft" of military systems. They are purposefully engineering a system designed to cement their position as a sole provider of OS components for network centric platforms. Nice bastardization of the open source components they are using to say the least.

Having tried repeatedly to get 2 SoSCOE nodes to communicate, we subsequently replicated 100% of the functionality that J-UCAS required using less than 150,000 lines of code and $2M of budget. Makes you wonder how long we need to support the programmer welfare for Boeing's "software engineers" and their 60 million line monstrosity if it can all be done with 400 times less code than that?

Re:And Appropriately

[dkleinsc]

So how is this different than your typical government contract work?

Re:And Appropriately

[Lord Lemur]

You make a great set of points.
I would like to ask a question or two that you might have an answer for, and that is pretty f'ing relevant. Didn't anyone stop to think, that maybe it's not the best approach to allow our military logistical communications to be built on an infrastructure of Open-Source parts. Wouldn't that make finding holes much easier for our enemies? How do you classify and protect open-source code, even if you are just using components?

Re:And Appropriately

[powerlord]

Well ... IANAL but ... technically with open source code, you only are expected to provide modifications to source, to your "customers". Correct?

In this case, the customers would probably be "the military" from Boeing's perspective.

The individual soldiers are not the customer, so they don't get the source, just pre-compiled binaries installed on the systems they are using. The military itself can then decide that its employees should respect that code as Trade Secret (perhaps, although things like "National Security get bandied about a bit), and penalize anyone who tells other people about its workings (since SOMEONE within the Military will want/need to look at the code, probably in a tech support/services branch).

note: the "other people" mentioned above are not customers using the system, and therefore are NOT required to have access to the Source Code, even according to the GPL, and thats not even counting the fact that apps running on a stock kernel could be licensed under a different license (while the above discussion about GPL changes would still apply to kernel changes).

Re:And Appropriately

[Hal_Porter]

Whether you like it or not, it IS a dog-eat-dog world out there. Playing ostrich isn't going to change that fact. M-M-Metaphor police!

Dogs are actually afraid of ostriches.

Re:And Appropriately

[Hal_Porter]

The United States has a corrupt government, where people are lied to and brainwashed into supporting wars for the personal ambitions of a few wealthy men, not the benefit or defense of the nation. Yeah, no doubt. But apart from a few things like the coup in Chile, recognizing the PRC or abandoning South Vietnam ( basically most of what Nixon and Kissinger did) I think they did the right things anyway.

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

SoSCOE will probably be what brings FCS down. (Locally, whenever someone complains about something not working in it, the reaction is generally "what's new?") Along with the sheer number of different companies working on the thing trying to keep things away from each other because they're competitors.

And I, personally, feel like FCS would replace this, not Blue Force. But more likely, features that were supposed to go into FCS will get sucked into AFATDS instead.

Re:And Appropriately

[Pensacola Tiger]

Wrong. Please go read the GPL .

Re:And Appropriately

[Hal_Porter]

Actually if you believe in Enlightened Self Interest, selfishness doesn't make you inherently evil. I suspect it's mostly a matter of how much power people have. Provided it is not too much, their self interest will tend to be of the enlightened sort. So not only would someone like Stalin or Hitler be less likely to be elected in a democracy, they would have to behave better if they were or face impeachment, prison or assasination. Similarly most US presidents were the sort of clever, driven people that would be really dangeous if they had absolute power. The reason that they behave better than their totalitarian opponents is because they want power and behaving better is the price for that in a well designed system.

But you're right that voting won't change how enlightened the politicians are. That's a function of how well designed the checks and balances are in the system they operate in, not of party. Though partisans from either side will obviously try to convince you that it is since nothing gets people to vote like moral outrage. They're not lying to you per se, they are partisans because they actually believe it.

Actually there's another subtlety about the US. Since the people that get elected tend be successful, clever bastard you'd expect them to try to gnaw away at the checks and balances. But that's not necessarily in their interests. If the system changed to a more dictatorial one most of the current large ruling class would actually lost everything and only a small ruling clique would gain. And neither the winners nor the losers could count on a peaceful returement. You can sort of sense this when you read Churchill's comment about democracy being the 'worst system except for all of the others'. Incidentally Churchill is a good example of a successful elected leader that had an enormous ruthless streak when he operated outside a system of checks and balances, e.g. gassing the Kurds in the 1920's or advocating dropping anthrax on Germany in WWII.

Re:And Appropriately

[dave1791]

I'm not advocating having only one tool in the box. A strong military is simply part of the spectrum of tools.

I do agree that Machiavellian moves are counterproductive in the long run.

Re:And Appropriately

[JohnFluxx]

Say the US had no military at all, but just the minimum required to maintain its nuclear arsenal, plus the various groups for protecting against the odd suicide bomber etc.

In this situation, would the US be protected any less compared to having a mighty army?

Re:And Appropriately

[TapeCutter]

"Oh, and the whole thing hinges on futuristic radios that don't work."

The radios are healing themselves! Try dimming the lights and rubbing some lavender oil on their antennas you insesitive clod!

Re:And Appropriately

[JohnFluxx]

source?

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

When did economic growth become more important than human lives?

Because of simple relationships like this:

Economic growth means higher standards of living which means less people starving to, um, death. Or, um, dying from disease.

Sheesh.

Here is an article from Physics Today that shows the mathematics of why growth cannot be sustained

Sure it can't. Your name happen to be Malthus?

:-P

Re:And Appropriately

[Alexpkeaton1010]

No one in the military will ever look at that code. The military just brings the contractors into the war zones. Generally these guys are almost always ex-military and do a fine job, and it is probably far cheaper to just pay the premium for "experts" than to attempt to train privates on technology that you probably need an advanced degree to fully understand.

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never heard a single FCS'er praise SOSCOE except to say that each version is just a little less godawful than the last, which I suppose is better than nothing.

It's ironic that while FCS is going linux with C/C++/Java as the languages, the other program offices are spending many millions to port everything off UNIX and Solaris and onto Vista and .NET. Supposedly, they're all going to meet in the middle and talk via a standard services architecture, but there's a mighty lot of hand-waving going on there.

I've heard FCS characterized as "too big to succeed, but too big to fail". I think there are a lot of defense contractors circling overhead waiting to pick up the pieces when it breaks apart into a zillion baby-FCS programs. In any case, the millions of lines of code figure is just a measure of how much stuff everyone's going to have to integrate into their other programs, and thus actually a barrier to FCS's success.

Re:And Appropriately

[ultranova]

Say the US had no military at all, but just the minimum required to maintain its nuclear arsenal, plus the various groups for protecting against the odd suicide bomber etc.

In this situation, would the US be protected any less compared to having a mighty army?

Actually, yes. If Joe Tyrant hires a group of mercenaries and takes over New York, what are you going to do ? Nuke it ?

Military exists to back the authority of the government with force if needs be. When it is needed, it is usually desirable to use as little of that force as possible, to minimize the inevitable collateral damage. If the minimum force that can be used is a nuclear missile, then the collateral damage is going to be huge.

Re:And Appropriately

[rtb61]

So what you are saying is you should not complain unless you country is the very worst or perhaps to save the country any embarrassment corrupt politicians should not be pursued or investigated, or a military that makes a mockery of law and justice should be ignored. It would appear people are already shaking and more the just their heads, they are shaking their fists, placards and banners.

Any and all corruption in government, should be highlighted pointed out and ruthlessly pursued, and those politicians, corporate executive, and military officer should be charged with treason when citizens lives are lost.

All the propaganda in the world, does not restore the least bit of honour or integrity, once it is abandoned in the torture chamber, squandered in senseless violence upon children in some else's country upon and made a mockery off in a kangaroo court (oh sorry tribunal) where the verdict is known before the mock secret (their too embarrassed to even make it public) trial even starts.

You should never be embarrassed for pursuing corrupt governments, you should only be embarrassed if you do nothing or even worse, if you attempt to hide it or criticise those who refuse to turn a blind eye.

Modern infantry combat systems where the arms manufacturers have finally figure out a way, where the death of every military combat soldier will net them a substantial profit in the replacement of merchandise, the grunt on the ground has every reason to be truly afraid.

Re:And Appropriately

[mdwh2]

As opposed to what nation? North Korea? China?

I have no opinion on whether the OP is right or wrong - but the commonly heard argument of "Hey, it's not as bad as [insert very corrupt nation]" is not exactly a ringing endorsement. You should be showing how the US is no more corrupt than a nation not usually seen as corrupt. Saying that the US is less corrupt than the most corrupt nations on the planet tells us nothing.

Re:And Appropriately

[ibbie]

Well, wouldn't you be? It's a giant bird!

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, should you guys be discussing these issues publicly? Probably not.

Re:And Appropriately

[sgtrock]

When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred.

...

And if it be urged that whoever is armed will act in the same way, whether mercenary or not, I reply that when arms have to be resorted to, either by a prince or a republic, then the prince ought to go in person and perform the duty of captain; the republic has to send its citizens, and when one is sent who does not turn out satisfactorily, it ought to recall him, and when one is worthy, to hold him by the laws so that he does not leave the command. And experience has shown princes and republics, single-handed, making the greatest progress, and mercenaries doing nothing except damage; and it is more difficult to bring a republic, armed with its own arms, under the sway of one of its citizens than it is to bring one armed with foreign arms. Rome and Sparta stood for many ages armed and free. The Switzers are completely armed and quite free.

-- Niccolo Machiavelli

Machiavelli understood that true security comes not from relying upon a small cadre of professional soldiers, but through the direct participation of the citizenry in all forms of military service. Too bad most politicians never learn that lesson.

Re:And Appropriately

[dave1791]

You are asking for a simple yes or no answer to a complex question. America's worldwide military presence has a complex history. Historically (prior to the second world war), the US had a weak, minimalistic military; essentially just a middleweight navy with hardly much of an army. An enormous driving factor in America's busybody, self-appointed world-police role is the second world war; namely the runup and things like Czechoslovakia being sold out by Western European countries. The conventional wisdom in America is that it was wrong to stand idly by while a bombastic dictator was essentially able to conquer a country with the tacit approval of that Britain and France. This "if we don't play policeman, nobody will" plays a large role in this habit of poking the beehive, if not among leaders (who may themselves have Machiavellian strategic agendas), but among the public; especially the Republican leaning part of the electorate most inclined to support foreign adventures. Disagree with them or poke fun at their naiveté if you want, but these people (the usually working class supporters of a strong military) really believe this. Politicians also tend to believe it at some level. Nobody, no matter how cynical, is completely immune to the prevailing worldview of their nationality.

To give you a yes or no answer, I'd reckon that the US would be as safe or even more safe of its military presence in the wider world was smaller. In fact, then the US would be able to join the moralistic crowd of rich, but weak nations that lectures others about what they should be doing; a position it has exchanged with Europe since WWII.

Now I'll counter with a question. Would the world be better or worse off?

Taiwan would likely have been invaded by now. America's strong military and ambiguous position on defending the island probably helps keep tensions there down. Chinese military planners can neither discount American involvement, nor count on it. If they could count on American help, they could plan for it with certainty as Japan Japan did prior to Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was a move designed to disable the Americans so that they could not interfere with a Japanese takeover of Southeast Asia and Indonesia's oil. The ambiguity of the American position means that Chinese planning such a move against the US raises the possibility of China having to fight an unnecessary war against a powerful foe. The ambiguity of the American position also prevents Tiawan from recklessly proclaiming independence. On the whole, the US acts as a stabilizing influence in East Asia. A China/Tiawan war is far less likely and the possibility that they will eventually come to a mutually agreeable solution is greater.

On the other hand, the Iraq war would not have happened. Whether peace would be prevailing in the region is hard to say. Wars did not start with America's presence and there are intense rivalries for regional influence; rivalries fuelled by oil wealth. Israel would be much weaker relative to its enemies. The real question is - and I don't think anyone can really answer this - would that lead to a mutually agreeable solution, or to Israel being overrun and an ensuing genocide? Asking that question is just asking for people to come out of the woodwork and ra-ra their side.

Re:And Appropriately

[stewbacca]

No. What I think he is saying is everything is relative, and he (like I am) is sick of the hyperbole.

Re:And Appropriately

[WindBourne]

Exactly WHAT do you base your OPINION on? Or did you just pull it out of someplace? Others who STUDY this, say that we are not so clean anymore. We are certainly not China, NK, Iraq, Iran, or even Russia, but we are certainly not one of the least.

Re:And Appropriately

[cshotton]

I dunno the genesis of the "open source" meme with this FCS story. The SoSCOE code I worked with wasn't made of very much open source stuff. In fact, the initial versions weren't even aimed at Linux. The crap all ran on SGI boxes. So to the extent that they have aimed the code base at Posix compliant operating systems, I guess Linux can play now.

In any case, open or closed source doesn't matter much these days when you have countries like China willing to pay 1000's of hackers to reverse engineer all sorts of stuff, source code or not. All they need is access to the system and it'll eventually have all of its holes uncovered.

Re:And Appropriately

[renoX]

>This "corrupt government" nonsense really gets to me. The US government is quite possibly one of the least corrupt governments on the planet

Well this depends on your definition of 'corrupt' but starting a war under false pretext is being very corrupted in my book (corrupted by Oil's greed).

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone intimately familier with the 'bizarrely dysfunctional display system', the best way to set China back 15 years would be to 'leak out' SoSCOE and WMI to them... I wouldn't trust Boeing to engineer a toaster, let alone a military system, this project is a Major Cluster F***.

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

why not worry about the murder in your home town? don't you have smaller fish to fry?

Re:And Appropriately

[TapeCutter]

"Maybe you've got some metaphysical touchy-feely answer as to what the purpose of life is"

Can't speak for the GP but I do, and coincidently it's the same as yours...

"...it's achieving as much as I possibly can today, and improving as much as I possibly can tomorrow."

Not surprising since most people like apple pie, but before I subscribe to your newsletter could you please tell me more about what you want to "achive" and "improve".

Whether you like it or not, it IS a dog-eat-dog world out there.

Cave men were known to regularly look after the weak, old and injured members of the tribe. Since then countless humans have given their lives over the last 10 millenia to build and defend their families, towns, states and civilisation(s), the existance and extent of which directly contradicts the notion that the "dog eat dog" senario is the dominant state of human interaction.

Sure we still behave as a bunch of feudal states, and individuals will always compete and often cheat. However the whole reason we have managed to get this far as a species is that millions of individuals got together and co-operated to "achieve and improve" things far beyond the imagination of any individual - an obvious example being the system that allows me to post this little "glass is half full" rant.

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

Your president blatently lied to the population (and the world) in order to start a war. The real reasons for the war have still not been made public. Somewhere around one million civilians are dead because of this war (Lancet).

Shall we get into all of the wonderful things that the CIA has been doing that have managed to make it into the public record? One could read books on the subject and still only see the tip of the iceberg.

And let's not forget the US's newfound love of torturing POWs (sorry, they aren't POWs, they are TERROR PEOPLE OF TERROR).

As apposed to what nation, you ask? I am having a hard time thinking of a first-world western nation that holds a candle to the US as far as corruption goes. Sure, there are lots and lots of governments that are more corrupt than the US. The thing is that if you were to somehow multiply corruption by GDP then the US will pretty much dwarf everyone.

Are the American citizens under the boot of the Fourth Reich? If you were a German citizen in the years leading up the second world war then at what point would your answer have shifted from "no" to "yes"? Do you hear that sound in the distance? It sounds like boots marching.

The United States HAS a corrupt government. It has a government that is more corrupt than it was last year and I will be amazed if that isn't still true a year from now.

Give your head a shake!

Re:And Appropriately

[JohnFluxx]

I was mostly responding to my parent post, stating that the military is there to protect you and that without the military 'bad guys would be hurting you'. Particularly in the context of this article, which is about more advanced military capabilities etc.

My argument is that with only a skeleton military force, the US would be pretty much just as protected as it would be with one.

I'm not however making any moral argument or judgement about protecting others. A military force is required if you want to protect others. If someone argued that the US should have a military force in order to act as a world police, then that would be a valid argument, but different from arguing whether it protects the US.

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

And somehow I could see the Chinese & Russians countering the technology with existing OTS wifi & cellphone technology which is kitbashed and rejiggered with modified IM and VOIP software as a communication system. It would go into production for a mere fraction of the costs associated the U.S./NATO system, and likely sold to any interested third-world country or other group willing to buy it.

Sure, it may not be secure as our systems, but would be plenty good enough for time sensitive information that would be of little importance once decoded.

Re:And Appropriately

[quanticle]

The only winning move is not to play. Not to play the Bismarkian game.

Funny. I was under the impression that not playing was the guaranteed losing move. If you "don't play", and withdraw from the world, you leave yourself at the mercy of other countries. I'd rather have military power and be able to negotiate on an equal (or even superior footing).

In fact that's actually my criticism against the Iraq war. Militaries should not be committed for long-term nation building projects, because that saps your saps your strength, and you've no guarantee that they country you build (or re-build in this case) will be able or willing to help your interests in the region. This leaves you in an off-balance situation for an extended period of time, hampering your ability to deal with other threats and unexpected situations (read: North Korea, Pakistan) as they arise.

Re:And Appropriately

[Xybre]

Actually, I'm not sure the Third Reich was all that corrupt in comparison to the United States. Additionally, most "corrupt" countries and so on a small scale, you can bribe the cop to get out of a ticket, or whatever, politicians take kickbacks from drug lords.. but in the united states? No, we have corporations! The money a drug lord pays to the corrupt leaders around the world is pocket change to the money politicians in the US make off of corporations.

They're just more subtle about it through years of refinement.

Actually, this is Chicago, it's not all the subtle.. and it's not all corporations..

Re:And Appropriately

[WindBourne]

And of course, the real issue for the West is that China is perparing for War. They show a budget that would BARELY pay for their troops. It does not begin to cover any of the advanced weapons that they have acquired and/or built of late. In light of how they are acquiring resources and playing with economics combined with a sudden massive build up in their military, I would say that it will be sooner, not later that another world war will come.

And yes, I know the argument that they have a trillion dollars in their bank (and I might point out 100 billion euros). If this was a democracy, then I would not be worried because the locals would simply take out the leaders for stupidity (that of giving up a $/euros). The problem is that you a totalitarian country where a number of leaders are more worried about revolt from below esp since there will be a real shortage of women, so will go to a massive war to stop it.

Re:And Appropriately

[Brandybuck]

It's not the Foruth Reich, but it certainly isn't the bright shining light of liberty and democracy it once was. But the corruption is incidental. Corruption isn't the problem, it's a symptom. The corruption occurs because government is selling privilege. Scoundrels run for office to get a piece of it, corporations set up lobbying divisions to get a piece of it, and voters form blocs trying to get a piece as well. It's human nature, and once government gets too big you cannot stop it. We need to get government small enough that it doesn't have any excess power and privilege to hand out.

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

SoSCOE will probably be what brings FCS down. (Locally, whenever someone complains about something not working in it, the reaction is generally "what's new?") Along with the sheer number of different companies working on the thing trying to keep things away from each other because they're competitors.

Well..from what I've seen of it, there is more to FCS that will bring it down than simply SoSCOE - such as the NMS component which is just a big piece of junk designed by people that are into the commercial world, not government but still working the project; and all they want to use is Java - even when told they have to use things like Assembly by requirement. Needless to say, I do hope the entire thing gets canceled.

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to clarify, which President propagated this lie, again? With all the chatter, I have a hard time remember who we're supposed to be blaming for the propagation of this "lie."

Re:And Appropriately

[0ptix]

Here are the results of Transparency International's survey. Globally, yes the US does seem to be doing quite well. Compared to other developed/western nations the pictures not quite so rosy. They seem to be closer to the mean then the min... Of course this is but one survey and only of "perceived" corruption. But at least it's better then no references...

Re:And Appropriately

[CodeBuster]

Makes you wonder how long we need to support the programmer welfare for Boeing's "software engineers" and their 60 million line monstrosity if it can all be done with 400 times less code than that? Very few decisions in government, and particularly technical decisions, are based upon logic or reason but rather upon the shifting sands of the political calculus and the wonderfully irrational conclusions reached by our politicians. The private sector is becoming just as bad in many ways, albeit with less red tape. My own theory is that the generally decreasing number of Americans with a background in science, engineering, or mathematics in relation to the overall population is leading us towards a more politically correct, willfully ignorant, and reactionary society that is increasingly abandoning logic, reason, and the scientific method for whatever is politically acceptable and expedient or fits with what the marketers, pollsters, and politicians are trying to sell this week.

Re:And Appropriately

[WK2]

The United States has a corrupt government As opposed to what nation? North Korea? China? This "corrupt government" nonsense really gets to me. The US government is quite possibly one of the least corrupt governments on the planet, yet you act as if you're currently under the boot of the Fourth Reich. Give your head a shake!

I agree that the USA is less corrupt than most countries. But shit doesn't get less stinky just because you bring it into a sulphur hot spring.

Re:And Appropriately

[lessthan]

Yes, that is all well and good for you, but you're sane. Not everyone fits into the sane category. Also, despite the conviction that you can detect insanity in others (which you share with many people), some of the insane are quite convincing and able to fool people into following them. Sometimes insanity develops even when everyone involved is sane. Plus, I'd like to see a source on the caveman statement. I would argue that it is the freaks of nature that advance society, opposed to people "working together." In the Middle Ages, everyone worked together to produce some kickass cathedrals, but it took a crazy Guttenberg to get people out from under the Church's thumb.

Re:And Appropriately

[c6gunner]

I'm not sure what you are trying to argue, exactly, but the OP was attempting to explain to us that all the suffering in the world is a direct result of greedy westerners who can never get enough power. Which is a load of horse shit. If you're simply arguing that humans co-operate on a regular basis, then yes, absolutely, I agree with you. We cooperate with each other when we think it's in our best interest, which is what creates wealth and achievement. But if you're trying to pile on the OP's bandwagon, well, you're not doing much better than he was.

Re:And Appropriately

[c6gunner]

Ultranova already answered you pretty well, but to expand on that, flexibility is a key tenet of military might. The more options you have at your disposal, the better able you are to respond to any circumstance. Even in day to day lifer there's really only two ways to discourage an opponent:

1) Make him think you're friggin' nuts. In other words, if he tries to mug you, you're going to slaughter his whole family. Mobs operate this way.

2) Make him realize that you are so professional at the use of force that ANY infraction on his part will always result in a measured and effective response from you.

That's about it. In order for your scenario to be effective, the US would have to assume a policy of....well, insanity. You'd have to be willing, and make others believe that you're willing, to drop nukes at the slightest provocation. Otherwise, other nations will simply keep pushing you until either you collapse or you snap and finally fire off your nukes.

Just as importantly, without military might, you lose influence on the world stage. It's not very politically correct to point out that military strength is still one of the most important factors in global diplomacy, but that doesn't make it any less true. And if you don't understand how influence translates into safety, well, there's not much I can say in a slashdot comment to make it clear to you. I could probably recommend some books, but that's about it.

Re:And Appropriately

[couchslug]

"The only winning move is not to play. Not to play the Bismarkian game."

At which point those willing to play will promptly trounce the idealistic fools who abdicated their place in the game.

Re:And Appropriately

[TapeCutter]

I don't agree with the OP, nor do I agree with the Gordon Geko world view of the post I replied to. Both are myopic.

Re:And Appropriately

[TapeCutter]

"Yes, that is all well and good for you, but you're sane....despite the conviction that you can detect insanity in others"

I spy an ironic strawman.

"but it took a crazy Guttenberg to get people out from under the Church's thumb."

And do you know the title of the first books that came off his presses? Dispite your conviction that Guttenberg was crazy, much of the demise of Church influence over everyday life in the west has occured during my lifetime (no, I am not 500yrs old).

"I'd like to see a source on the caveman statement"

Then do some reseach, you might find there is more to history than second millenium cathedrals and Guttenberg.

"I would argue that it is the freaks of nature that advance society, opposed to people "working together.""

So WW2 was won by the elephant man rather than an alliance of competitor states against a common enemy?

BTW: One must be very selective when dinning on dog meat. The prisoner/gaurd thing still requires the prioner/gaurd to cooperate with their own TRIBE.

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

Ans just this week Boeing fired everybody on the FCS project who was over 45 and immediately replaced them with younger workers. They actually instructed their managers to do this. "You mean I have to fire 12 workers and hire 8??!?"

Re:And Appropriately

[Anonymous Coward]

You might have replicate the functionality of SoSCOE, but could you _interoperate_ with the Boeing SoSCOE?

I suspect that Boeing will have a lock on the weapons systems software market because tons of application software will require SoSCOE, and only the Boeing-provided SoSCOE will interoperate with other Boeing-provided SOSCOE systems. So, Boeing gets to control the software in any weapons system that works with FCS.

Re:And Appropriately

[c6gunner]

I had to look up Gordon Gekko to figure out what the hell you were talking about. Here's the first quote that pops up on wiki:

"It's not a question of enough, pal. It's a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another."

Which is pretty much the exact opposite of what I believe. If anything, it's much closer to what the OP was suggesting; that the western way of life is based on the exploitation of other nations. This seems to be a common theme amongst people who do not understand economics - the belief that money cannot be created or destroyed, and so all wealthy people must acquire their fortunes by making others poor. In reality, wealth is created every time one professional exchanges goods with another professional, and the rich and successful tend to drag the poor and incompetent along with them, making everyone richer in the process. But you can't be a hip anti-establishment "progressive" without blaming the rich and powerful for all of the worlds problems, so....well, there we are. The end result is that the worlds poor and the worlds "progressives" have brainwashed each other into believing that the creation of wealth is evil, because being rich must means you're exploiting someone else. It's a rather twisted way of looking at things, but it's frighteningly common.

BTW, as far as I can tell, Gordon Gekko seems to be a socialists caricature of a modern businessman. You didn't actually take that movie seriously, did you?

Re:And Appropriately

[TapeCutter]

The quote Gordon Geko is famous for is "greed is good", but like I said I don't agree with either of the previous posters myopic worldviews.

"The end result is that the worlds poor and the worlds "progressives" have brainwashed each other into believing that the creation of wealth is evil, because being rich must means you're exploiting someone else"

The word for those people is "envious", and I don't think it correlates with either a lack of money or a particular political outlook.

"Gordon Gekko seems to be a socialists caricature of a modern businessman"

Close, it's a caricature of a rabid capitalist, it's also based on a real person who was locked up for insider trading.

Re:And Appropriately

[c6gunner]

Heh. Judging by the quotes, Gordon Gekko is as far away from being a "rabid capitalist" as it's possible to get. He's more of a legal crime-lord, or a modern day warlord. He believes that the only way to get ahead is by destroying his opponent. That's not capitalism - sure, true capitalists always try to outperform the competition, but no "rabid capitalist" would ever suggest that wealth is a finite resource, or that the only way to get it is by utterly destroying the competition.

Re:And Appropriately

[TapeCutter]

I agree with you, but the reason I call him a "rabid capitialist" is that people who behave like Gordon justify their actions with capitalistic rhetoric. After all a rabid dog does not act like a normal dog.

The movie may have lost something in context over the years but I was well in my late 20's when it came out, the politics it was commenting on was the rise of the service industry and the death of western manafacturing as promoted by M.Thatcher, et al. The main two characters are Gordon and an old guy who controls an antiquated but asset rich manafacturing bussiness. The "greed is good" speech is made at a stockholders meeting where the two protaginists espouse their worldviews in an effort to win control. Thing is, following either path to it's logical conclusion will ultimately kill the company.

One message I see in the movie is that capitialisim cannot exist without cooperation and compromise, the exact opposite of the "dog eat dog" world that the OP's, Gordon and the old man all percieve, (for better or worse), as the dominant state of human interaction.

Re:And Appropriately

[lessthan]

Ouch. The sanity thing was a big blunder. Here, let me fix it

...but you appear sane...

There, fixed. I was trying to express that it is occasionally difficult to suss out a person's motive and judge those motives as reasonable. As to guessing you were sane, I assumed that your motive for posting was a yearning to share your knowledge, something I consider reasonable. From this, I concluded you were sane. The rest of your post seemed combative to me. I hope I'm not being provocative.

You certainly have odd ideas about reasonable discourse. I ask you for the source of your assertion that cave people cared for the old. I did this because, while I certainly could do my own research, you would know the best source. You made the claim very authoritatively. When I followed your link just now, all I found was some waffling about herbs and witch doctors. The Wikipedia article certainly set an all new low for unverifiable claims. I would be grateful if you pointed the way.

As to the claims about the Church, I am at a loss. The Roman Catholic Church held a stranglehold on people's lives and afterlives for a millennia. It was, in part, the mass distribution of common language Bibles that freed people like Martin Luther to develop their own take on religion. ("Hey! Where is the part about indulgences?")Without the Protestant Reformation, it'd still be okay to burn atheists at the stake. I'd call that a lessening of "influence." Therefore I connect the printing press to a freedom of religion, an advancement which many first world countries now enjoy.

WW2 is your idea of society advancing?

The point of my prisoner/guard example was that they did cooperate, even though it was to the prisoners' detriment.

Re:And Appropriately

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

An enormous driving factor in America's busybody, self-appointed world-police role is the second world war; namely the runup and things like Czechoslovakia being sold out by Western European countries. The conventional wisdom in America is that it was wrong to stand idly by while a bombastic dictator was essentially able to conquer a country with the tacit approval of that Britain and France.

Er, thats utter bullshit. The US had been projecting military power worldwide to protect its economic interests since the start of the 20th century, if not earlier. Read up on Smedley Butler if you want to learn about that. It is not now and never was "world police". Most of the US didn't want to get involved in the war until the Japanese came and planted one swiftly between the nuts at Pearl harbour. Weak nations my arse. On the other hand, the Iraq war would not have happened. Whether peace would be prevailing in the region is hard to say. Wars did not start with America's presence

More bullshit. The US did fund Iraq and supply them with advanced weaponary and training, and caused the problems with Iran. How did Gaw Bush know Saddam had WMDs? He still had the receipts.

Oh please...

[drDugan]

software will automatically "heal itself," retrieving the information

Anthropomorphizing technology is rather misleading... especially in this case, "when death is on the line!"

Re:Oh please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Truly you have a dizzying intellect.

Re:Oh please...

[Anonymous Coward]

To top it off, this news comes from a group who actually DID start a land war in Asia.

BSOD tradeoff.

[bobdotorg]

So by avoiding Windows, no BSOD on the battlefield. But instead we risk a Colonel Panic? (sorry)

Re:BSOD tradeoff.

[Cannelloni]

That joke is still funny, but not for much longer. I expect soldiers to be court-martialed for it soon. Also, I still think Mac OS X has a better-looking Colonel Panic than most other UNIX-based operating system. ;)

Re:BSOD tradeoff.

[Chris Mattern]

At least we might avoid General Failure reading our hard drive.

Game

[Traa]

Would you like to play a game of Global Thermonuclear War?

Re:Game

[drDugan]

As I recall, the computer very much wanted to play chess, not war. In a beautiful commentary on human stupidity and aggression it was the person who forced the computer to play war. It was the point of the movie.

Re:Game

[Marcion]

Did not it actually want to play tic-tac-toe?

Re:Game

[Traa]

You are absolutely right. The phrase that I used doesn't actually exist in the movie. But it wasn't just that the computer wanted to play chess rather then war, the movie goes one step further and the person guides the computer first through a tic-tac-toe game and then through the war scenarios showing that that kind of war can't be won.

At least that is how I remember it....but it has been a while.

Re:Game

[powerlord]

Close.

The idea is that the computer can grow and learn. First they start playing the computer in tac-tac-toe, then they get the computer to play tic-tac-toe against itself. From there, the computer makes the "intuitive" leap that there is such a thing as a No-Win Scenario, where neither side wins (or both sides lose depending on your perspective).

It then starts "gaming" all of the Nuclear Strike options it has been programmed with, and that it can come up with (some of them are pretty outlandish Wost-Case-Scenarios), and decides that Nuclear War is one of those situations.

All the humans in the story did (theoretically), was start the computer down the path of discovery, and let it learn (and then hope it did so, and that it did it before it broke the launch codes and started WWIII).

Okay ... I'm going to go hang my head in shame that I knew all that (and then go out and buy the Blu-Ray/DVD so I can rewatch it :) )

Uptime?

[cobaltnova]

"How many times does your computer system go down in a week?"

On Linux?

uptime
02:08:53 up 36 days, 13:58, 0 users, load average: 0.59, 0.59, 0.50

But this is, of course, no indication of what can be seen in the military: they won't be updating their kernel every couple of months and rebooting.

Re:Uptime?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just curious how you ran uptime with no users logged in?

That's clever.

Re:Uptime?

[ianezz]

I'm just curious how you ran uptime with no users logged in?

Just ssh user@host uptime.

SSH does not perform a real "login" (in the sense of allocating a pty and writing in utmp) when specifying a remote command to execute. Thus, havin zero users loggged in is normal in that case. Try it yourself.

Re:Uptime?

[cobaltnova]

Not to get OT, but, it's just the quirky way I start X (from the console):

startx&;disown;exit

which (apparently) doesn't leave an entry in utmp.

Re:Uptime?

[ianezz]

Thanks, I did't know of "disown".

Born to Kill

[clarkn0va]

So are we going to see an official logo featuring Tux with "Born to Kill" scratched on his helmet?

db

Re:Born to Kill

[Anonymous Coward]

Get over yourself. Linux is used in many, many military systems these days and has been for some time.

BFT, the other project mentioned in the article migrated to linux five or six years ago. It started (disgustingly enough) on SCO 3. It was ported briefly to SCO 5, then onto Solaris X86 and ultimately onto RHEL.

Re:Born to Kill

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I'd favor a "Fear the Penguin" label even if it might tick off a certain beer company.

Re:Born to Kill

[Hal_Porter]

More to the point, if a Linux based bomb is dropped on Iran and fails to go off so the Iranians have a flash chip with the binaries, can they ask the Pentagon for the source code under the GPL? What happens if they capture one of the planes or tanks? Seems like they definitely have the binary of the code then and have a right to the source code.

This is great!

[Alexx K]

Now the troops can compile Gentoo while on duty. Hopefully, it'll be finished when they get home.

Re:This is great!

[MrMr]

No worries, it will be finished sooner, January's Gentoo will definitely be compiled before christmas.

Re:This is great!

[thatskinnyguy]

A watched "emerge" seldom does.

P2P heal thyself.

[Anonymous Coward]

"code. Boeing's Schoen said that it is designing software so that if soldiers lose their connection, the software will automatically "heal itself," retrieving the information within seconds without rebooting.""

Piratebay already has prior art.

OR

[AndGodSed]

General: "Where are my tanks!?"
Tech Officer: "Coming sir, we're having some dependency problems..."

Re:OR

[XnPlater]

Tech Officer: "Anyway, now that we're compiling them with -O3, the enemy won't stand a chance, sir!"

Re:OR

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me, maybe they didn't use Microsoft since the episode they had with DOS:

Whenever they tried to read from a faulty floppy, it came up with
"General Failure reading disk in Drive :A"

So, who is General Failure, and why is he reading my disk in drive A:?

Licensed to kill

[drDugan]

I'd love to see a software license that says something to the effect of "This software will not be used to wage war or to kill any humans".

Re:Licensed to kill

[unbug]

I'd love to see a software license that says something to the effect of "This software will not be used to wage war or to kill any humans". It wouldn't be an open-source license, though. From the Open Source Definition: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.

Re:Licensed to kill

[urcreepyneighbor]

So, ah, you want a PussyOS? Maybe the users will lovingly refer to it as POS?

Re:Licensed to kill

[casi0qv]

Being a pacifist does not make you a "pussy," it means that you value human life and realize that violence is pointless and ineffective. Pacifist action actually requires an enormous amount of courage, as it is often more dangerous to yourself than violent action. People that use violence fear peace, because they know it is an effective tool against violence. Virtually every leader in history who tried to promote peace was assassinated (MLK, John Lennon, etc.).

Re:Licensed to kill

[Gilesx]

So what are you saying here? That violence was "pointless" and "ineffective" when dealing with Hitler?

Re:Licensed to kill

[Daniel Dvorkin]

The fact that violence is sometimes necessary does not mean that it is always, or even usually, a useful solution. Little kids run around hitting people they don't like. Adults understand that violence is a last resort.

Re:Licensed to kill

[AngelofDeath-02]

You might first consider that Hitler's violence brought down violence upon himself.

While you imply that violence was effective and valid against him, I say that it never would have been necessary in the first place, were he not out for genocide. Also, a lot of his inspiration was WWI, and Germany's spectacular defeat.

It's kind of a silly argument, but perhaps the pacifist's realize that while they cannot control other's actions, they can control their own and NOT be Hitler. Not everything is about some evil villain from our history, or about lives lost in battles fought.

Re:Licensed to kill

[donscarletti]

I'd love to see a software license that says something to the effect of "This software will not be used to wage war or to kill any humans".

Why?

Take WWII as an example, you've got a whole bunch of Japanese moving east killing 3M Chinese soldiers defending their homeland, murdering 17M unarmed Chinese civilians mainly with swords and small arms. Germans get in on the action, invading Czechoslovakia and Poland. They get bored and ramp up action invading Scandinavia, France and the Soviet Union killing 23M soviets (half civilian) while they were at it. Jews of course were shot on site or sent to an automated death factory, 3M all up. The Germans start bombing the crap out of the UK and the Japanese exploit the distraction and invade Singapore, capturing the defenders then starve or torture them to death in prison camps. This was the bad kind of killing, because they were killing because they desired more power.

But we all know this story and what happened next. The British Commonwealth, U.S. and Soviet Union killed a truly amazing amount of people and fixed the problem. It is completely thanks to violence that German and Japanese people are now nice rather than nasty. The US military helped get the Japanese out of China / South East Asia and the Germans out of the bulk of Europe and thus prevented them from killing any more people while they were there. This was the good kind of killing because they only started killing when they had killers to kill and they always aimed to make peace when the killers were killed. I bet you can't think of any non-violent organisation that cut short such an evil set of events.

This is why violence is only bad if you're violent to the wrong people and why I wholly endorse any of my works to be used for violence against the right people. It's not as if the Third Reich or Japanese empire would have cared about your stipulations. If someone did honour it, they must be the sort of people who care about individual freedoms and intellectual property and thus those who you'd probably want to win the conflict anyway.

Of course the problem is that the military forces of the US and my native Australia spends most of its time invading irrelevant countries to look like it is dealing with terrorists, but that does not mean that its role in the world is wholly a negative one, they beat up a lot of bad people too, like the Taliban who had it coming to them long before they helped hide Osama bin Laden. Our Aussie guys went over and kept away a bunch of armed militia that was trying to stop East Timor from regaining its independence, NATO did some bombing to stop the Serbs from killing the Muslims in Kosovo. When the military isn't killing people you get things like the Rwandan genocide in the mid 90s when nobody got around to killing the aggressors so they were able to kill whomever the hell they wanted.

Thus, killing in general is a completely morally neutral action.

Re:Licensed to kill

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not, but the great mistake was waiting until he had enough forces to conquer half Europe before deciding it was time to do something.
This about the official story; actually this wasn't a mistake but rather waiting the right moment to gain more political advantage.
Being European myself, I'd prefer the US didn't enter the war at all, since helping invaded countries like mine was just an excuse to gain political influence and territories to turn into military installations.

Military oppressive regimes don't last long, corrupt fake democracies do. If my politicians at that time didn't lower their pants to the US govt. asking for help, after a terrible decade or two probably my country would have become a much free country than it is now, where every statement coming from the USA becomes law.

For you nationalist homeland-god-nascar-whatever americans who proudly wave your flag every morning, before flaming me, just imagine how's nice being forced to do what a country on the other side of the planet says, a government you have zero voting influence on, but nonetheless still dictates what your one can or cannot do.

Re:Licensed to kill

[mwlewis]

If they want to be pacifists, fine. But stop pretending that it's a luxury that we can afford. You're never going to convince the Hitler's of the world to just be nice. Sometimes, you just have to shoot them. So you'd better be ready to shoot or be shot.

Welcome to the real world.

Re:Licensed to kill

[stubob]

You're still missing the point. During study of a martial art (warfare on a personal level), you quickly learn that the objective is not to go looking for fights, but to be able to save your life should you (as a last resort) be in a situation where the only option is to fight (aka, the other guy is looking for a fight and won't take No for an answer).

Pacifism isn't about not fighting, it's just not going looking for a fight.

Re:Licensed to kill

[mwlewis]

That's not a definition of pacifism that I've heard before. Nor does it appear to agree with the pacifists in this thread. Your definition fits perfectly well with developing a strong military.

Re:Licensed to kill

[Anonymous Coward]

When the military isn't killing people you get things like the Rwandan genocide in the mid 90s when nobody got around to killing the aggressors so they were able to kill whomever the hell they wanted.

Or the current situation in Darfur.

Re:Licensed to kill

[mweather]

There are no Hitlers of the world, and last time there was, we managed with a vastly smaller military budget. We didn't even have a decent air force. You don't need to constantly maintain a military force capable of fighting WWIII.

Re:Licensed to kill

[urcreepyneighbor]

There are no Hitlers of the world, and last time there was, we managed with a vastly smaller military budget. We didn't even have a decent air force. You don't need to constantly maintain a military force capable of fighting WWIII. You have got to be fucking kidding me.

Your ignorance is making my head hurt. Literally. I'm getting up, grabbing a couple Excedrin, and having a smoke.

Sweet. Fucking. Christ.

Re:Licensed to kill

[drDugan]

Thus, killing in general is a completely morally neutral action.

I agree mostly with your post.

The problem will occur in the future, when there are machines, running software that we wrote acting in fully- or semi-autonomous modes attacking other machines and people. Wars will quickly come to machine v. machine between advanced powers in unconventional ways and on nontraditional battlegrounds.

In this world, programmers who release code into the world, free, public domain, whatever, would benefit from having the choice to prevent their creative efforts from being used to perpetuate and increase violence.

The Army bit is irrelevant..

[bornwaysouth]

I've been hoping for some insightful comments, not being a Linux geek. Can anyone say anything about the wider implications. I'm not US competent. I guess the US Military is essentially a model of a well run business. (With a board of directors with a weird agenda.) So the completed system should be useful to a lot of people. I expect a BIG contribution from Microsoft to the Presidential runners to make sure the software never is allowed to be released to the wider community. "For Security Reasons". Given that the sensitive military code is going to be in its own well protected sandbox, it would probably take 10 seconds to create a public domain version, and about a century to release it.

Re:The Army bit is irrelevant..

[neBelcnU]

See www.defensetech.org, search for FCS, and prepare for a long, long read.

Re:The Army bit is irrelevant..

[stephanruby]

I've been hoping for some insightful comments, not being a Linux geek. Can anyone say anything about the wider implications. I'm not US competent. I guess the US Military is essentially a model of a well run business. If you're looking for wider implications that you may already have missed, look up the term "second sourcing" -- an invention of the US Department of Defense. The US Department of Defense has had an history of requiring its suppliers to have a "second source" of critical parts should one supplier/manufacturer fail to deliver for some reason. For instance, AMD wouldn't be where it is today if Intel, its competitor and arch enemy, wouldn't have shared so much information and even crucial training to make sure AMD could keep up as its official "second source" on their Defense Contracts.

I don't know if the wording is intentional or not, but it seems "open sourcing" is a logical progression on the original concept of "second sourcing", and intentional or not, it should benefit both the US military and the American people as much as that that first concept did benefit the US military and the American people in the past.

Good for them!

[Vskye]

NOT using anything related to MS is a good thing.

"How many times does your computer system go down in a week?" said Jim Currie, a retired Army reserve colonel, military historian and professor at the National Defense University.

Mine, personally not at all. Although this is not really related to Windows vs Linux, since both can have fubar programming on apps. Question is, if they do enough testing to get the bugs out?

Re:Good for them!

[Anonymous Coward]

Question is, if they do enough testing to get the bugs out?

If by they you mean Linux, then the answer is yes, if Windows then no. the real difference being that the bugs in the code of FOSS can be scrutinized by many and corrected, bugs in MS software are still there just no one but MS knwos how to fix them and that's a big problem if the baddies discover these little bugs first.

Re:Good for them!

[listen_to_blogs]

That's a very good point. An ideal strategy to not get enough bugs would be to fund one of the popular linux distros, build a community of developers and companies around it to flush out all the bugs. Yahoo is following a similar strategy for Hadoop (an open source distributed file system). -listen_to_slashdot

Re:Good for them!

[cornjones]

Question is, if they do enough testing to get the bugs out?

If by they you mean Linux, then the answer is yes, if Windows then no. i know i will be modded down for seeming to defend ms but...

90% of the software you run on windows is not written by MS. Most of the windows crashes are not really caused by windows. I run multiple windows machines that very rarely crash (1-2 times a year?) and my purpose built ones _never_ crash (well, does a power outage count?).

If you believe the stats from the windows crash analysis, a very large percentage come down to 3rd party device drivers. That these drivers have the ability to bring down the OS is an issue in itself. Albeit, one that is largely done for performance reasons and something that linux has problems with as well.

Re:Good for them!

[dreamchaser]

If an application can crash it then it's the fault of the OS, not the application. That includes device drivers from 3rd parties. It's still the responsibility of the OS to be fault tolerant, resilient, and secure.

Re:Good for them!

[bilbus]

If they chose to use a 360 controler .. its because the solders play video games and it is something they know how to use. It is a cheap off the shelf product, need a extra go pick one up .. no need to rely on a military supplier. If something is going to get dammaged its the input device .. they are not using a xbox to control the uav .. so the point of your xbox being unstable is not even relevent.

Re:Good for them!

[ausmusj]

90% of the software you run on windows is not written by MS. Most of the windows crashes are not really caused by windows. I run multiple windows machines that very rarely crash (1-2 times a year?) and my purpose built ones _never_ crash (well, does a power outage count?). The point is that a crappy 3rd party *application* on Windows *shouldn't* be able to make the *Operating System* crash! You run a crappy 4rd party piece of software on Linux, and the app crashes, it doesn't take the system with it. Once in a while it might take X-Windows with it (if it's a *really* crappy app), but, again, advantage Linux, X-Windows is not the Operating System.

Now, does the Linux kernel never crash? Does it never have bugs? Of course it does, but it's open source, so you get a whole bunch of developers all over the world looking into the transparent inner workings of the operating system to figure out *why*, and fix it immediately.

Regarding drivers, yes, crappy drivers are a big reason that both Windows and Linux can crash. However, that's why Linux developers (and most Linux users) push strongly for open source drivers - so that they can fix the crappy drivers and make them work correctly.

Blame game

[Wowsers]

If anything goes wrong with the project, they could always say it's General Protection's Fault.

Re:Blame game

[An ominous Cow art]

... and then administer Corporal Punishment.

Re:Blame game

[Anonymous Coward]

What a big project! Million lines of code damn! http://www.kanati.com.ph/

Here we go again

[Anonymous Coward]

Gawd. Another gays in the military article.

Re:Here we go again

[WK2]

I didn't see any mention of BSD.

On a slightly related note...

[lattyware]

I remember seeing a British Army advert where they control a UAV using a 360 controller, is this advertising, truthfully what they use, or trying to make it appeal to gamers? Either way, I was pretty disgusted. My 360 crashes so much, I really don't want to see the Army using them for anything.

Re:On a slightly related note...

[Mushdot]

I remember reading somewhere that the army used PS2/Xbox controllers for robot control so the advert is perhaps showing a realistic scene. It makes sense, as console controllers are cheap and readily available.

But to me it does feel like they are trying to make it more appealing by using the controller.

Re:On a slightly related note...

[Colourspace]

I think so - seeing as the qualification for equipment use in military battlefields can take many years before approval the XBOX360 controllers shown would have needed to be in prototype around 1999...

Re:On a slightly related note...

[Don_dumb]

I remember seeing a British Army advert where they control a UAV using a 360 controller, is this advertising, truthfully what they use, or trying to make it appeal to gamers? Either way, I was pretty disgusted. My 360 crashes so much, I really don't want to see the Army using them for anything. I saw similar advertising and think it is only the controller not the entire 360 they are using. UK military spending has to show value for money and not 'redesign the wheel' if unnecessary. If the 360 controller works and is readily available & cheap, why not use the 360 controller?

Re:On a slightly related note...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're assuming too much. It's likely the control system can use any Windows-compatible joystick/pad and guess what? The X-Box 360 controllers qualify.

Here in the UK, military spending is incredibly low and has been for so long that the army's operations are being severely hampered. For a comparison, the amount of money currently being spent to bail out a failing bank (£55 billion) dwarfs the annual defence budget. Our soldiers are poorly equipped, with not even enough funding to pay for adequate body armour. Everything is scarce, and the British army are well known for "borrowing" gear from their allies during a campaign. It seems not unlikely that either the cheapest readily available parts were grabbed in a rush, or even that the soldier is using a controller he "donated" temporarily to the cause.

Re:On a slightly related note...

[Colourspace]

An interesting point (so why post AC?) - But I work here in the UK with the military and I'm not sure I agree with that - as a supplier of silicon I have worked across a great many UK mil projects and I just don't see that holding water... Seeing some of the extra (thousands of) man hours of testing and qual that needs to be done over the consumer market to qualify kit for deployment, I doubt the bigger mil/aero companies would allow such a thing. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that if you were the government paying for a $$$$ UAV, are you likely to let someone control it with any old controller laying around or follow the whole 'feather the nests of the mil contractors' way of qualification (we all know how this market works). I think not.. Army personnel buying their own flack jackets to protect themselves - well that's understandable, if not a sad indictment of our defence spending here. But you cannot compare that to the command and control of (very) expensive electronics.

hey!

[Anonymous Coward]

torrent plz

Re:hey!

[Sabathius]

Man, I'm stuck at 87.3%. Somebody re-seed!

Loose tha Connexn

[Web Goddess]

"Boeing's Schoen said that it is designing software so that if soldiers lose their connection, the software will automatically "heal itself," retrieving the information within seconds without rebooting."

OK I read the article, which btw annoyingly requires javascript to view subsequent pages. I run a webserver, I know more than diddly squat about connections, wireless and otherwise. So I say with some authority,

WTF

Lose what connection? Heal itself sounds like medical buzzwords. Retrieve what information from where.

Increasingly it seems that communication with the masses involves comforting phrases, rather than meaningful content.

Wendy the discontent.

Re:Loose tha Connexn

[starsky51]

By the sounds of it, i'd say this was written by someone who sat in on a "Future Combat Systems for Dummies" presentation. I'd imagine the "healing" process is equivalent to services restarting themselves when they fail.

Re:Loose tha Connexn

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably aren't too far off. Ever make a "quad" for DoD? Million dollar research project summarized in a single ppt slide...

Re:Loose tha Connexn

[Jonner]

I think it's more likely the "healing" refers to reconnecting to the main network when a connection is lost.

Re:Loose tha Connexn

[samkass]

We're not talking about being able to save a word document here. In order for the soldiers on the ground to have full situational awareness and ability to command, there is a lot of data that has to get from here to there. If you have a direct link from here to there, great. If that link goes down, but the software detects that sending it over this packet radio, then that fiber, bouncing it off the other satellite and downlinking it to the stryker will get it there, it should auto-reroute it that way. I think that's what they mean by "self-healing". Kind of like the original internet was designed-- on steroids... imagine if it had incorporated routing information for every FIDOnet, HAM radio, telephone, and carrier pigeon in the country.

Several years of development...

[secretwhistle]

Perhaps it's time for them to upgrade to Reason 2.0.

Re:Several years of development...

[StarfishOne]

I'm afraid that that has a dependency on Common Sense 1.0

Re:Several years of development...

[Jester998]

Hmmmm? Are you proposing that US troops use bad, home-mix techno to vanquish their enemies (using software 2 major versions out of date, no less!)

How often does your compter 'go down'?

[Web Goddess]

"How many times does your computer system go down in a week?" said Jim Currie, a retired Army reserve colonel, military historian and professor at the National Defense University.

Far less than once per week. Linux server? Reboot every six months whether I need it or not, to the consternation of my hot-shot sysadmin. Mac OS-X on my MacBook Pro? Perhaps every three weeks.

Somewhat alarming is the implicit assumtion that computer systems "go down" (and not in the yummy sensual sense" many times per week, per day. That does seem to be the common perception, no doubt rooted in the lamentably widespread useage of Microsofft.

Re:How often does your compter 'go down'?

[SgtChaireBourne]

Somewhat alarming is the implicit assumtion that computer systems "go down" (and not in the yummy sensual sense" many times per week, per day. That does seem to be the common perception, no doubt rooted in the lamentably widespread useage of Microsofft.

If history recognizes Gates for anything, it will be for making bad engineering acceptable.

However, the problem has an impact far outside of engineering circles. Pretty much everyone uses desktop computers and have been worn down into not just accepting but even expecting that tasks and tools do not work efficiently or even properly. Often that ends up causing a crisis-management state where everything is left until it becomes a crisis and crises pre-empt each other. Another way it ends up is in complacency and a lethargic apathy where the MS victims perceive, incorrectly, that all technology is equally poor and there is no use in taking a professional interest in the tools used in their jobs. Then, people being people, they apply that outlook on their work tools to the rest of life around them and voilà : the Microsoft effect.

Maybe that was the final drop what tipped the economy over the edge.

Insightful?

[HBI]

OK.

The software in question will never see the public Internet because it's all classified Secret and above. Well, the data and operating environment are. The kernel itself will be unclass but FOUO, most likely, so that could conceivably be contributed back out if something interesting were in it. My guess is that there won't be. Military systems, even the classified variety, tend to be very vanilla by commercial standards and rarely have interesting features. It is how they are deployed that makes them redundant or otherwise suitable for their task.

So expecting contributions back will be kind of ...limited. I'm sure *some* things will find its way back out, but in practice, if a hack needs to be made on the code to make things work in an actual theater of operations, I wouldn't count on it appearing outside in the real world anytime soon.

This isn't the first military program to use Linux as a basis, btw. Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and Below (FBCB2) uses a RTOS optimized kernel for its work, having converted from Solaris.

That said, DA has a huge Microsoft ELA contract which everyone is pushed towards. So I don't expect a lot of OSS innovation from the Army.

Re:Insightful?

[AciDLnx]

>> The software in question will never see the public Internet because it's all classified Secret and above.

This is incorrect. I've worked on FCS / SOSCOE. Specifically, integrating the current FBCB2 systems into FCS. Nothing was classified Secret. It was all just FOUO.

Re:Insightful?

[HBI]

Speaking of most of the Army's tactical systems: When the software is integrated and in use it is Secret. When it's on install CDs it tends to be FOUO, but there are configuration details left off the installs because that would aggregate enough implementation detail to be classified. I speak of 'most' because all the current ABCS systems I have experience with.

My comments still stand.

Re:Insightful?

[cshotton]

SoSCOE is not classified. It can be used (and demonstrated) in unclassified environments without issue. The JTTRS (radio) and crypto components are obviously classified, but the core platform is only controlled now by a bunch of lawyer babble and proprietary rights claims that Boeing inflicts on anyone wanting to use it.

Re:Insightful?

[Malevolent Tester]

I'm assuming FOUO is For Own Use Only - wouldn't that break the GPL by banning redistribution or are internal controls allowed?

Re:Insightful?

[stewbacca]

The software in question will never see the public Internet because it's all classified Secret and above.

I work on FCS. Every part I've worked on has been unclassified.

Re:Insightful?

[imtheguru]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOUO

Re:Insightful?

[aminorex]

FBCB2 is in every humvee. You can't make them all secret, in a theatre deployment, because you've got troops who aren't even US citizens. You've got troops who are there as an alternative to the penitentiary, or in order to get citizenship qualification -- they're never going to get clearance.

Lines of Code?

[PinkyDead]

Now there's a useful metric. It says so much about quality and reliability.

But killing puppies with linux is okay?

[SmallFurryCreature]

How about fluffy kittens? Aliens? Dolphins? How about the biosphere?

What about the use of linux in a somekind of euthanasia device or do you get to dictate how other people should life and die their own lives?

Offcourse your suggestion is silly and goes against the very spirit of opensource.

Mod parent down...

[thrill12]

...ofcourse parent is right, but this type of argument is usually spoken when the discussion is not nearly at that level.
It quenches any discussion , because no one dares to disagree.
If parent want's to partake in a discussion, try to counter the argument with something more sensible and wise - on the same level as the argument-giver.

Re:Mod parent down...

[Anonymous Coward]

...ofcourse parent is right, but this type of argument is usually spoken when the discussion is not nearly at that level.
It quenches any discussion , because no one dares to disagree.
If parent want's to partake in a discussion, try to counter the argument with something more sensible and wise - on the same level as the argument-giver. Damn right it "quenches" any discussion.

It's pretty much an irrefutable argument pointing out the utter futility of absolute pacifism.

Pacifist vacuously claims, "Violence never solves anything." WRONG!!! Here's the real-world example.

Since it's obvious violence HAS solved some serious problems in the past, events such as WWII can rightly and quite effectively be used to refute pacifist arguments.

Re:Mod parent down...

[swillden]

It quenches any discussion , because no one dares to disagree.

No one dares to disagree because there is no way to rationally refute it.

"violence is pointless and ineffective" is clearly, unambiguously false. That doesn't mean that violence is the only, or the best way to solve problems of course. There are times when non-violent resistance is clearly the best approach. So rather than stating banal and obviously false generalities about violence, those who prefer a non-violent solution to a given problem should rationally explain why a non-violent solution is better and more effective.

Locate soldiers by their radio emissions?

[ehb]

I just wonder how easy the enemy can pinpoint the soldiers now by monitoring the radio emissions from their new communications hardware? Try writing software for it that understands it has to "shut up" at certain critical moments, and not just go calling out to base with information requests...

Re:And Appropriately tsarkon reports

[Anonymous Coward]

Tsarkon Reports 9 Step Yoda Grease 9 steps to greasing your anus for Yoda Doll Insertion!
v 4.50.1
$YodaBSD: src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/yodanotes/9stepprocess.sgml,v 4.50.1 2008/01/25 04:40:45 tsarkon Exp $

1. Defecate. Preferably after eating senna, ex lax, prunes, cabbage, pickled eggs, and Vietnamese chili garlic sauce. To better enhance the pleasure of this whole process, defecation should be performed in the Return of the Jedi wastebasket for added pleasure.
2. Wipe ass with witch hazel, which soothes horrific burns. (Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda certifies that his lips, raw like beaten flank steak from nearly continuous analingus with dogs, are greatly soothed by witch hazel.)
3. Prime anus with anal ease. (Now Cherry Flavored for those butthole lick-o-phillic amongst you - very popular with 99% of the Slashdotting public!)
4. Slather richly a considerable amount of Vaseline and/or other anal lubricants into your rectum at least until the bend and also take your Yoda Doll , Yoda Shampoo bottle or Yoda soap-on-a-rope and liberally apply the lubricants to the Doll/Shampoo/Soap-on-a-rope.
5. Put a nigger do-rag on Yoda's head so the ears don't stick out like daggers!
6. Make sure to have a mechanism by which to fish Yoda out of your rectum, the soap on the rope is especially useful because the retrieval mechanism is built in.
7. Pucker and relax your balloon knot several times actuating the sphincter muscle in order to prepare for what is to come.
8. Slowly rest yourself onto your Yoda figurine. Be careful, he's probably bigger than the dicks normally being shoved up your ass!
9. Gyrate gleefully in your computer chair while your fat sexless geek nerd loser fat shit self enjoys the prostate massage you'll be getting. Think about snoodling with the Sarlaac pit. Read Slashdot. Masturbate to anime. Email one of the editors hoping they will honor you with a reply. Join several more dating services - this time, you don't select the (desired - speaks English) and (desired - literate). You figure you might get a chance then. Order some fucking crap from Think Geek. Get Linux to boot on a Black and Decker Appliance. Wish you could afford a new computer. Argue that cheap-ass discount bin hardware works 'just as well' as the quality and premium hardware because you can't afford the real stuff. Make claims about how Linux rules. Compile a kernel on your 486SX. Claim to hate Windows but use it for World of Warcraft. Admire Ghyslain's courage in making that wonderful Star Wars movie. Officially convert to the Jedi religion. Talk about how cool Mega Tokyo is. Try and make sure you do your regular 50 story submissions to Slashdot, all of which get rejected because people who aren't fatter than CowboyNeal can't submit. Fondle shrimpy penis while making a Yoda voice and saying, use the force, padawan, feeel the foooorce, hurgm. Yes. Yes. When 900 years you reach, a dick half as big you will not have.

All in a days work with a Yoda figurine ra

Imagine?

[dreamchaser]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of soldiers???

Meh, ok. I had karma to burn on a tired meme.

FCS Should be Cancelled

[tjstork]

The thing about FCS is that, when early versions of it have been tried in our present war, soldiers have found that the extra computerization is often not worth the weight of the computer. It seems to me that if the Army is going to be spending billions of dollars developing anything, they ought to be looking for a way to detect hidden explosives. FCS doesn't do a damn thing to aid against insurgencies whose primary weapon is the booby trap.

Re:FCS Should be Cancelled

[SuiteSisterMary]

soldiers have found that the extra computerization is often not worth the weight of the computer.

And back when semi-auto rifles were introduced, soliders didn't think it was worth the extra weight and hassle over their good old bolt-action rifles.

And back when muskets were introduced, soldiers didn't think it was worth the extra weight and hassle over their good old lances and calvary sabres.

And back when long swords were introduced, soldiers didn't think it was worth the extra weight and hassle over their good old gladiums and scutums.

Re:FCS Should be Cancelled

[DerekLyons]

FCS doesn't do a damn thing to aid against insurgencies whose primary weapon is the booby trap.

So what? Do you think that insurgencies will be our only target always and forevers?
 
 

The thing about FCS is that, when early versions of it have been tried in our present war, soldiers have found that the extra computerization is often not worth the weight of the computer.

First generation systems typically have problems like that. The solution is to continue to evolve the system, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Re:FCS Should be Cancelled

[tjstork]

And back when semi-auto rifles were introduced, soliders didn't think it was worth the extra weight and hassle over their good old bolt-action rifles

First off, the M-16 is full auto with three round bursts, so, its not a semi-auto in the sense of the AR-15 is at all. In any case, the modern combat rifle actually weighs less than the bolt action rifle that preceded it, so, there goes that argument. And I would be more than willing to bet that a good broadsword actually weighs more than either a bolt action rifle or an automatic rifle.

And your argument is ridiculous anyway, because, every advance in weapon gives you additional killing power and the ability to defeat an adversary. A notebook computer doesn't. If the Army needs an upgrade in computers anywhere, its in its logistical chain. But seriously, if you look at the casualties from Iraq, they are overwhelmingly from IEDs. If our guys had a detector for IEDs, then, there would be far fewer wounded and far fewer killed, and that to me, is worth the billions in R&D needed.

Re:FCS Should be Cancelled

[stewbacca]

every advance in weapon gives you additional killing power and the ability to defeat an adversary. A notebook computer doesn't.

Woah...talk about being behind the times. Information has replaced bullets in increasing combat power.

Re:FCS Should be Cancelled

[tjstork]

Woah...talk about being behind the times. Information has replaced bullets in increasing combat power.

You can be in a room with your notebook, and I'll have my gun, and we'll see who wins in a fight. :-)

Re:FCS Should be Cancelled

[stewbacca]

No doubt bullets can kill, but without good intel, bullets are kind of indiscrimant killers. Besides, FCS is full of firepower as well, so it's not just about lines of code. Go check out the briefing slides available from Boeing. Those are some killer fighting vehicles!

http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/ic/fcs/bia/051012_2006flipbook.html

Re:FCS Should be Cancelled

[Anonymous Coward]

What a load of bull.

Re:FCS Should be Cancelled

[aminorex]

Hey, they can have my scutums when they pry my cold, dead hands...nevermind.

Clearly the computers will very quickly come to weight nothing. Unlike my scutums.

Re:FCS Should be Cancelled

[tjstork]

No doubt bullets can kill, but without good intel, bullets are kind of indiscrimant killers. Besides, FCS is full of firepower as well, so it's not just about lines of code. Go check out the briefing slides available from Boeing. Those are some killer fighting vehicles!

See, I'm not impressed with the new vehicles at all. A lot of the FCS vehicles are basically designed to shrink the size of the army down because M-1 tanks are too heavy to fly. The M-1 is a good tank, except that, it would do better on fuel and possibly maintenance with a diesel engine rather than the turbine that it has. My thought was, rather than doing the Rumsfeld thing of trying to shrink the Army down so that we can fit it into airplanes, why not just build bigger airplanes?

Re:FCS Should be Cancelled

[SuiteSisterMary]

Who's talking M-16s? I'm talking Springfields, Garands, and the like.

The G.I. Tux

[towsonu2003]

The G.I. Tux, one more thing we did not need in this world...

SAIC = EVIL EVIL EVIL!!! *shudder*

[jamrock]

Did anyone else here feel the alarms going off at the mention of SAIC in the linked article? I read the March 2007 Vanity Fair piece about SAIC, and saw the accompanying PBS program about the investigation by the writers of the article, which names many former government officials and military officers who sit on the SAIC board of directors. Among them was David Kay, the former weapons inspector who was instrumental in making the case that Saddam Hussein was in possession of WMD's. SAIC is one of the lead beneficiaries of military and governmental contracts in Iraq, and while the Vanity Fair and PBS pieces don't explicitly say so, the question is raised as to whether SAIC helped manufacture a case for war in order to reap substantial rewards for their part in the aftermath.

For such a large and influential company (44,000 employees, more than half with security clearances), SAIC manages to operate well below the radar of public awareness, and in light of the many Washington insiders with links to the company, their ability to attract large numbers of enormously lucrative governmental contracts (9,000 at the time the article was published) appears to be a clear conflict of interests. For many years their largest customer was the NSA, and SAIC is notable for their failure to deliver on a number of huge contracts, only to be awarded follow-up contracts to fix the problems with the original deliveries.

In his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower popularized the term "military-industrial complex" when he presciently warned against its influence: "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted." The existence of a company like SAIC probably has him spinning in his grave. People here like to call Microsoft evil, but SAIC makes them look like a bunch of dewy-eyed innocents. I urge everyone here to find out more about this shadowy corporation; I can guarantee that your skin will crawl.

Re:SAIC = EVIL EVIL EVIL!!! *shudder*

[stuntpope]

SAIC is notable for their failure to deliver on a number of huge contracts, only to be awarded follow-up contracts to fix the problems with the original deliveries. I would venture that is the case for many of the big name government/military contractors.

Re:SAIC = EVIL EVIL EVIL!!! *shudder*

[Brandybuck]

Pffft! SAIC is the little guy. They're basically a bunch of decentralized almost-autonomous offices. Far larger are Raytheon, Boeing, BAE, Lockheed, etc. But the Military Industrial Complex Problem isn't agoing to be solved by focusing on one company. You need to attack the system itself. You used the Microsoft analogy. Do you think proprietary software would disappear if Microsoft were disbanded? Hah!

Re:SAIC = EVIL EVIL EVIL!!! *shudder*

[ginbot462]

Shadowy corporation? That's hilarious. As the other responder pointed out, SAIC is more like a bunch of semi-autonomous divisions. Everybody has a security clearance because most of the work is service work for the government. As far as shadowy goes, SAIC gets a lot of its work because it is NOT one of the big players (again, service oriented, so no product to sell). So, they can be more a neutral 3rd party.

What we really need...

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Weapons that accept rough treatment and shoot straight.
2) Bullets, spare parts, and a logistics system that works.
3) NCO's that can lead, officers that know when to get out of the way.
4) Armor where it's appropriate, and light enough to carry all day.
5) A clear mission, one suited for military rather than diplomatic action.
6) Take care of the troops both before AND after they're shot up.

oh, and

7) Forces that really understand what it means to take the King's shilling.

Number 17, actually

[Foerstner]

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/gov_cor-government-corruption

A notch behind most of Europe & Oceania, but slightly ahead of France and Spain.

Re:Number 17, actually

[kidgenius]

Actually, it's in reverse order. Least corrupt at the top, most corrupt at the bottom. Those third world countries are far more corrupt than the US. Also, at the top it says to pay a parking ticket in Finland because it's the least corrupt government, though they have them at #3. So we are the 17th LEAST corrupt government around. Out of ~160, I like where we stand.

Re:Number 17, actually

[Foerstner]

Which is why I said, "A notch behind most of Europe & Oceania, but slightly ahead of France and Spain."

Where "behind" means " in a secondary or inferior position" and "ahead" means "in or toward a more advantageous position."

Halo Editions

[Joseph Hayes]

Finally, an explanation for the ugly green halo 3 edition stuff.... it would look great as an official army controller!

Humanity's epitath

[elrous0]

"All that open source, free-wheeling development was great until the poor developer control and coordination allowed the program became self-aware, with no single off switch."

The Army's working from an obsolete business model

[finlandia1869]

I think the real problem is that Army doesn't have any real experience with developing and sustaining large-scale, integrated, systems of systems. I also bet that the Army program managers in charge of FCS (and the generals/secretaries they report to) don't have a grasp of the advantages of open systems and smaller, competed contracts in terms of avoiding vendor lock-in and increasing competition. The Navy is just now figuring this stuff out and they've been at it for decades.

I think the next biggest problem is that the Army didn't have firm requirements to work toward. They thought not in terms of "what do we need to get done, and what do we need from FCS to accomplish it," but rather "what cool stuff can the new shiny do?" That leads to requirement creep and constant changes because you're basing your development requirements on capability and not on what doctrine says you need. So you start work and three years later someone comes up with a new Cool Thing that the generals are impressed by. Now you have to add that, requiring changes that require other changes and increase costs.

Now only if they'd bring Americas Army back

[r_jensen11]

I still don't get why they abandoned development for A.A. on both Mac and Linux

Re:Now only if they'd bring Americas Army back

[Anonymous Coward]

I still don't get why they abandoned development for A.A. on both Mac and Linux

Probably because they realized the average Linux or Mac user is too smart to play a US military propaganda device disguised as a game.

Re:Now only if they'd bring Americas Army back

[dave562]

I'm mostly joking when I say this, but AA is a game to glamorize life in the infantry. Your average Mac and Linux user is much too wise to end up in the infantry.

Having played AA, I would think it would turn people off to the Army. The speed at which you die on a new map playing against people who have had a few days to familiarize themselves with the map is astonishing. I have to imagine it's kind of like being a grunt in Iraq when an ambush happens. "What? I'm getting shot at? Oh, I'm dead? Okay... time to wait for the next round.." ????

Mandriva and the PLF to the rescue

[flyingfsck]

Mandriva is in the trenches already. See the Penguin Liberation Front: http://plf.zarb.org/

Don't quote stats unless you read them

[ragid]

From the link:

"A CPI Score relates to perceptions of the degree of corruption as seen by business people and country analysts and ranges between 10 (highly clean) and 0 (highly corrupt). Includes police corruption, business corruption, political corruption, etc. Data for 2005."

So this data combines three forms of corruption, only one of which is what we are actually talking about.

2 Comments:

[Phoenix919]

First comment: All I can think of is war of the 21st century somehow becoming a war between hackers. An amusing and yet frightening concept. Second comment: One step closer to Skynet. awesome.

Re:The Army's working from an obsolete business mo

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but the Army anticipated their own inability to manage a program of this size, so they outsourced even that, making Boeing the "Lead Systems Integrator" (LSI). See, it's in the contract that Boeing will do all the hard work of developing the subsystems and subcontracting out the development. Therefore, the government doesn't have to worry about it anymore. Nothing can possibly go wrong. The Army's role seems to be to watch and make suggestions that are ignored.

This is the same Boeing that is having integration problems with their own 787 airplane. Oh, and they just have to finish the software for it, as if it's a trivial task. The 787 and FCS are going down the same road.

Now I get it!

[master_p]

The Army is making Duke Nukem Forever! that's right...63 million lines of code, all dedicated to the best game ever. 3D Realms is simply waiting for the army to finish its code.

The code includes interfacing will all the systems used in the battlefield by a special forces soldier, like mr Duke. This code will be used by 3dRealms to drive the on-screen action, for ultra realistic gameplay!

We have a right to know.

[quanticle]

Why not? If a major multi-billion dollar military system is turning into a Charlie-Foxtrot, I'd damn well like to know, before it fails in combat, preferably.

Does the author have a clue?

[REggert]

From TFA:

"hostlist.6223.soscoe.c16. That line of code, like modern-day hieroglyphics, flashes on a flat screen in a classified Boeing plant...."

What kind of line of code is that? It looks like a filename or an identifier of some sort, not any programming language I've ever seen.

Also from TFA:

"Congressional investigators are also concerned that the lines of code have nearly doubled since development began in 2003."

Nearly doubled since development began? Let's see, last time I checked, 2 x 0 = 0. Or did they start out with some code before they began development?

Why they can't use Apple

[ruinevil]

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant --- read the bottom.

I think Theo of OpenBSD said that he allows the users of OpenBSD to use it to make weapons to destroy where he was living at the time... somewhere in Australia if I recall correctly. However his anti-Iraq war comments made DARPA cut his funding.

Why military computer projects turn to crap

[Whatsmynickname]

For anyone who wonders why a lot of military software projects (but not all) turn to crap, as the parent posters allude to, read War Upon The Map.

IMHO, This is the most insightful paper into the deep interworkings of DoD politics and how it influences software design. I've experienced this myself and what the parent posters say does not surprise me in the least.

Re:$9 trillion in debt and they want robot soldier

[Brandybuck]

The US has a braindead monetary policy. The theories of Keynes have been discredited for decades how, yet the US continues to tinker with illusory macroeconomic knobs. We're entering a recession right now, and these proposed stimulus packages will only lead to a depression. "Stimulus package" is the economic equivalent of drinking vodka to cure a hangover.

Inflation (increases in the money supply) create the boom/bust business cycle. Cheap credit and easy money lead to malinvestments and create a boom. But then there is a correction leading to a bust. And so on. We saw it with the Dot Boom, and we're seeing it now with housing. The general consumer gets hurt worst of all, because that poor schmuck loses his job AND gets the new money last after it has been devalued.

Going back to a gold standard is pretty radical. A far more "moderate" approach is get the government's hands off the macroeconomic knobs. Stop futzing with the money supply and the interest rates. Greenspan tended to keep his hands off, but Bernanke is acting like a kid at Christmas. He scares me.

Re:$9 trillion in debt and they want robot soldier

[DeadlyBattleRobot]

We have over 10x military budget of the next country, China. This cannot end well.

Very recent article:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174884/chalmers_johnson_how_to_sink_america

The radio interview is here:

http://antiwar.com/radio/2008/01/24/chalmers-johnson-3/

Re:$9 trillion in debt and they want robot soldier

[Ralph Spoilsport]

thanks for picking up on that - I derive a lot of my ideas in this regard from chalmers johnson. He's a good man.

pacifism and realism

[drDugan]

To those who understand pacifism, it is obvious that violence caused "Hitler", from his childhood, and onward through the degradation of Germany in WWI. This is difficult to argue in discussion because it speaks to human personality and behavior.

Unfortunately, bringing up the "Hitler" in a rational discussion is a strong indicator of dealing with disturbed individuals, and it does typically end the useful discussion.

I'm not strictly a pacifist. I don't agree with the statement "violence never solves anything" first because it is an absolute, but mostly, I would use violence: when a criminal breaks into my home and starts after my family, I would use violence without hesitation.

However, to me it is clear that violence begets more violence, every time. Sooner or later, those who are on the receiving end of the stick want to fight back. It sometimes comes back at the perpetrator, but most often does not. People do the "third-cat" routine, and release their anger on third parties, usually weaker ones. It is stopping this pattern that I would seek to change, to encourage non violent solutions wherever possible and prevent those controlled from reacting violently to others.

Save your idiot opinon, douche

[nunyadambinness]

Fuck off.

GGP was speaking in absolutes. If you choose to do that, any example that moots your point is acceptable.

Blame the idiot GP for choosing never when he should have chosen rarely.

"If parent want's to partake in a discussion"

Again, fuck you. You're not the discussion police, no matter how hard you try to set yourself up that way. No, you're actually a whiny fuck who hates that he's unable to refute GP.