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

[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

[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

[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

[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?

BSOD tradeoff.

[bobdotorg]

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

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:Oh please...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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!"

Blame game

[Wowsers]

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

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.