B-2 Stealth Bomber Gets Upgrade, Joins the '90s

WmHBlair writes "Flightglobal has a report about the upgrades being made to the B-2A Stealth Bomber, which include Pentium class processors, JOVIAL code rewritten in C, and fibre channel hard drives. The Register, as usual, makes light of this event with a tongue-in-cheek news item noting that the upgrade drags Stealth Bomber IT systems into the '90s."

Comments

I hate to break it to anybody

[Anonymous Coward]

but microprocessors that are designed to handle a nuclear EMP aren't blazing fast. But they are definitely not 90s technology.

I think the B-2 bomber will be fine unless its pilots require the extra computing power to play "punch the monkey" or the South Park Lemmiwinks game.

Re:I hate to break it to anybody

[Profane MuthaFucka]

>South Park Lemmiwinks game.

The B-2 is operated by the Air Force. Surely you must have been thinking of the Navy when you wrote that comment.

Bitchin'

[Etrias]

Can't wait to see it fire up and have the screen print out: It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Re:Bitchin'

[Atario]

More likely "It is pitch black, which is correct for a Stealth Bomber.".

Re:Bitchin'

[mangastudent]

Nah, even more likely:

It is pitch black. You are the grue.

Don't you mean?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

...upgrades ... include Pentium class processors ... "drags Stealth Bomber IT systems into the 90s"

89.999997612?

Re:Don't you mean?

[everett]

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

Re:Don't you mean?

[chrispatch]

I am Pentium of Borg. Division is futile! You will be approximated.

There's a Reason for That

[hardburn]

While the headline might be good for a light giggle, there's a good reason why it's 10 years behind. Airplane avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people die. That especially goes for a plane that uses a flying wing design (which are historically hard to stabilize without computer control), and potentially carries nuclear warheads.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[tzhuge]

In this case...

avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people don't die.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[Anonymous Coward]

More than that. Aircraft, especially military aircraft that fly at the altitudes the B2 does, also require "hardened" electronics, capable of handling much larger temperature ranges and higher electro-magnetic interference. That means the processors, while they may be Pentium class, are not Pentium's. They may even use ceramics for the ICs, but either way the new electronics would require a much larger feature size, and therefore less performance than the current cutting edge electronics.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[Anonymous Coward]

"pentium class", not pentium. It's actually an ARM processor (better tolerance to heat, radiation, environmental extremes, etc).

Re:There's a Reason for That

[B3ryllium]

... or the wrong people die.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[halivar]

No, the GP is correct. As Patton once said (paraphrasing), "the point is not for you to die for your country, but the make the other poor bastard die for his."

Re:There's a Reason for That

[Dun Malg]

...From the classic B-52 onwards, they do useful things like haul large quantities of high explosives other systems cannot match. Improvements in tactical control mean the folks on the ground can call in tremendous force when needed.

As a dirt-eating infantry guy, this is a pet peeve of mine. I feel a rant coming on...

The trouble is, the contemporary battlefield doesn't need the "tremendous force" of 38 tons of bombs, from 35K feet, that'll be here in 14 hours (B-52 from Diego) or worse, 40 hours (B-2 from freakin' Missouri!). There isn't a bunch of factories with static GPS coordinates that can be preloaded by ground crews into GPS guided weapons. It's largely just guys like me, calling on a radio, asking for a couple 500 pounders on the ridgeline 3 klicks away, to get two dozen guys with RPGs and machine guns, NOW!. The B-52, B-1, and B-2 just don't fit into that equation.

Modern air-to-ground warfare doesn't need "big" strategic bombers like that. For the last 50+ years, the US Air Force has been living in a fantasy world, a sepia-toned universe where it's perpetually 1950, where bombers were the strategic "big stick" that brought down the Nazis, and were the Alpha-to-Omega of nuclear weapons delivery. The trouble is, the former is a self-delusional lie, and the latter keeled over with the ICBM and finally died with the USSR in 1990. The Air Force mythology of strategic bombing is based on the largely pointless high-altitude mass bombing of Europe in WW2. The Key West Agreement of 1948 which separated the Air Force as its own service, separate from the Army and forbidding the Army to operate aircraft, centered heavily on the "success" of the strategic bombing of Germany, particularly the crippling of the German ball bearing manufacturing. Funny thing is, decades later when Albert Speer was asked about this, his reply was (paraphrased) "They were trying to bomb our ball bearing factories? If so, we had no idea."

The practical upshot of all this is that the Air Force was founded on a fantasy which continues to hamper its effectiveness to this day. Granted, my view on the subject is heavily colored by my 16 years as a lowly grunt in the Army, hiding in holes trying to get effective close air support from those guys; but I think my view is pretty accurate. There aren't any more superpowers to mount a credible air defense, to put up a serious opposition. The one thing that we really need from the Air Force is the one thing that they've consistently tried to get out of providing: Close Air Support. Air Force brass had the unmitigated gall to try to retire the A-10 in the 90's and "replace" it with the F-16! They constantly push for more air-superiority and high altitude bombing assets when the cold hard reality is that we don't need that. Contemporary warfare is non-linear, against small bands of irregulars operating in primitive conditions. As infantrymen, what we need from the Air Force is all-weather, low-altitude, precision ordinance delivery, but we hardly ever get it!. If I had a nickel for every time I saw the Air Force drop in the wrong place, or worse, "call in sick" because of bad weather, I'd have a hell of a lot of nickels. The military has always been a hotbed of backstabbing, featherbedding, and general power politics, and the Air Force continuing live in its glory days of WW2 is a prime example (don't even get me started on the Navy, they're even worse). The Army has managed to fill some of its air needs via helicopters--- and getting the Air Force to let us have those was a fight--- but helicopters are lightweight, short range assets. We need fixed wing air support, particularly in Afghanistan where altitude and weather make helicopter operations near impossible. Personally, I think the Air Force should turn over the A-10 and AC-130 assets to the Army and let us do our own close air support, and they can go sit around in their giant strato-bombe

Better functionally quaint than gee-whiz and oops

[ScentCone]

As was recently discussed about the current Mars lander mission, it's really just fine if something built to do a very specific job doesn't have support for this week's gamer-friendly video board, a hacked Wii controller, bluetooth, and a dozen USB ports. Hardened, reliable hardware and bug-free seems better than, say, some of the misadventures that some IT-intensive commercial aircraft have suffered over the last few years. It's OK to be one notch less cool when you're flying around with large weapons.

Not surprised, even if I am amused

[Duncan Blackthorne]

Having worked for a defense contractor (non-weapons, mind you) for 6 years, it doesn't surprise me at all that the technology for such things are at least 10 years behind state of the art. It takes so long to fully satisfy the requirements of a military contract, then it takes at least as long to fix all the little bugs that inevitably pop up after delivery; then there's the military amending their requirements halfway through the project, sometimes resulting in having to go almost all the way back to square one in the design cycle. Oh, and don't even get me started on requirements that belong in cartoons and comic books, not the real world of engineering.

maybe they should have stayed in the '60s

[speedtux]

I'm not sure that replacing JOVIAL code with C code is actually progress. If JOVIAL is anything like ALGOL 60, it's arguably a better programming language than C.

Re:maybe they should have stayed in the '60s

[Fear the Clam]

If JOVIAL is anything like ALGOL 60, it's arguably a better programming language than C.

It's HAPPIER.

Exactly right. It's obsolete

[heroine]

They should have written all the flight control in Ruby & made it an AJAX web application that runs on Firefox on an iPhone. That would make it zillions of times faster than that old C code & Pentiums, right?

Re:90's IS cutting edge for that stuff.

[DontBlameCanada]

I've worked on military CPU replacement in the past for a subcontractor. We were upgrading an early 60s avionics set built from, get this, AND, OR and NOR gates. The most complex part was a 4 bit shift register - pretty wild. So I know a bit about this.

The major problem with using components newer than the mid-90s is that they are so sensitive to radiation. Not EM, but Alpha particles and other cosmic rays. Its prohibitively expensive to rad-harden (radiation harden) sub-100nm chips and when that is achieved the yields are so low that the cost balloons even more. Radiation hits my cause the rare BSOD for you, on a nuclear armed aircraft its may show up as a MCOD - mushroom cloud of destruction.