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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."
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.
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...
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".
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.
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?
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
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?
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.
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.
.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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
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***.