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

And Appropriately

[AndGodSed]

Yes. It does run Linux.

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

[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

[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

[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: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.

Lines of Code?

[PinkyDead]

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

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:Licensed to kill

[Gilesx]

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

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: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.

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.

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: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: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.