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Top General: Defense Department IT In "Stone Age"
CWmike writes "U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James 'Hoss' Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was sharply critical Tuesday of the Defense Department's IT systems and said he sees much room for improvement. the department is pretty much in the Stone Age as far as IT is concerned,' Cartwright said. He cited problems with proprietary systems that aren't connected to anything else and are unable to quickly adapt to changing needs. 'We have huge numbers of data links that move data between proprietary platforms — one point to another point,' he said. The most striking example of an IT failure came during the second Gulf War, where Marines and the Army were dispatched in southern Iraq, he said. 'It's crazy, we buy proprietary [and] we don't understand what it is we're buying into,' he said. 'It works great for an application, and then you come to conflict and you spend the rest of your time trying to modify it to actually do what it should do.'"
I'm sure there is a joke in here some where about Marines, Computers and proprietary systems.
If only we gave the DoD enough cash for stuff like this....
...
So you mean ... like it does already? Have you heard of the FAA? Do you realize they have to certify everything that goes into an sort of aircraft bigger than an 'experimental'?
I spent my time under Clinton and Bush Jr as a 4067. That's a Computer Programmer in the Marine Corps. We had pretty solid gear available, decent servers, and a great network. One royal PITA though was the primary personel database was replicated out nightly from Kansas city. So any intra-base changes could take a full 24 hour window to propagate. Additionally, every 6 months we'd get someone new in charge of that database. And by "in charge" I mean a comitee, not a new DBA. And they would be compelled to rename half the tables and columns. Acronyms are good for 6 months, then all field names are typed in full, then we're down to 4 character codes, then into some strange "drop the vowels" campaign. ROYAL PITA.
As if that wasn't bad enough, in 2001 Bush and military leadership privatized the entire 4000 MOS field. 4066 (networkers) and 4067 (programmers) were lat moved to the 0600 MOSs (radio operators and field wiremen, along with some shunting to admin/clerical). So at the point I was heading out, we were going from a situation where Marines could review and make recommendations, to the point where purchasing decisions were almost entirely in the hands of private contractors.
It was removing just another cog in the machine to streamline the federal cash to corporate pockets process as the Foxes are now instructing the farmer on how to build a hen house.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
... the department is pretty much in the Stone Age as far as IT is concerned...
They said the same thing just before the toasters arrived.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
He cited problems with proprietary systems that aren't connected to anything else and are unable to quickly adapt to changing needs. 'We have huge numbers of data links that move data between proprietary platforms â" one point to another point,' he said.
To me that sounds like military IT is perfectly in tune with modern corporate IT. It sure sounds like every big company (or even smaller ones) I've ever been at.
The problem is what he really wants is the future. What he really needs is a good IT dictator with some vision, and a lot of power to send balky IT people out to the front line. If anyone can iron out the ego issues that keep traditional IT mired in fiefdoms, it should be the military...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Military, Police, Fire departments....
Have this odd mindset when making decisions. Way back I was putting a bid in to to do a financial report in (I think we proposed a basic Crystal report to read off their SQL Database) reports for a fire department. Quick job easy to do... If the project failed no real impact. However the Chief was insist the quality of the the product was of utmost concern because what the do can be the difference between life and death. Then they went with an other company who was willing to make their own reporting system from scratch for a lot more, but they liked it because it was there and custom just for them. And some how this system was better then using an off the shelf system. And being that their jobs are so important they deserve better then off the shelf.
A lot of the mind set is in terms of hardware these groups have a lot of specialized equipment that is better then off the shelf, and non standard. Firetrucks, Police Cars which are highly modified version of standard cars, the military has "Military Grade" for their equipment. So they are use to thinking that their stuff in order to be useful needs to be non-standard and custom.
I am sure we know IT is kinda more broad. That a system designed to process data for 100,000 people either for corporate use or military makes little difference. The difference is if something goes wrong do you get attacked by lawyers from the company or do you get attacked by the lawyers of the military.
The internet is such a hostile place to move your data anyways military grade isn't any different, they just do it in a way that makes it difficult for it to moved to the right spots.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
FTFA:
"If you want to open up the operational flight software in an airplane, think something along the lines of five years and at least $300 million just to open it up and close it, independent of what you want to try to do to improve it," Cartwright said. "We've got to find ways to do that better and more efficiently inside the Department of Defense for sure."
Damned right. Operational flight software on a aircraft is so fundamental, it should be thought of as part of the hardware. 'Opening it up' is akin to redesigning the aircraft. You don't do that outside of the design and manufacturing environment. If you missed something in testing and acceptance, then there is a process for that. It takes 20 years sometimes to deploy new aircraft. You want to fiddle with the software over the weekend?
General Cartwright has NFI what he is asking for. And should be kept away from it. Stick to the desk, General, and the troops, and leave the engineering to the engineers.
Sheesh. A fair argument for not giving them more.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This is what you get when government bureaucrats are bribed and bidders take the rest of platforms that are needed. Surprise, since I.T. in these departments have no say in the purchases all hell breaks loose and the government wonders why hundreds of billions of dollars are missing. Meanwhile the corrupt companies use that money earned to buy off more politicians to write laws stating to buy their products at inflated prices where you and I pay for them in our taxes. Lovely ... anyone in the private sector knows what I am talking about too with this. Specifically when a CEO has lunch with his buddy at Crapware Inc, which sells a product that you need to support that only works with Windows Vista update 23303 on May 12th 2009 ... on a tuesday, in addition to another product that Crapware Inc. sells, that only works with IE 6 in Windows XP with Java 1.3.1, not 1.3.2 or 1.3.0, which all of course has to communicate together. More fun and joy and of course it is all your fault and not the CEO if it is expensive and can't work together you are the computer guy right?
The difference is in government all software and hardware is done this way and not just for some dumb executive's decision one time. Maybe if the pentagon had a CIO who made these decisions instead they could standardize on a platform so they can talk to each other.
http://saveie6.com/
When your process is so complex that procurement types have to go to classes just to understand it and has so many rules that no one really understands it you get a system that heavily favors companies that understand the rules better than the people running the system. They know exactly what to do to meet the letter of the law and how to protest if they lose a bid so inmany cases the government is at their mercy. Combine that with a contracting officer's fear of even accidentally violating the rules and winding up in trouble and you have a system that always goes the "safe" route
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
what do you really expect when you whore out every project to the (random) lowest bidder?
I'm not actually american, and making the american military more effective is not necessarily in my interests. Just would be sorta nice for more of that incredibly vast american military expenditure to be going towards improving free and open source software, which improves the world, not just america.
That would mean more money available for bombs to drop on you. Instead, push for Windows For Warships and you can watch us tow our destroyers out of your harbors on Patch Tuesdays.
Have gnu, will travel.
Military aircraft are outside FAA requirements.
That said they still have pretty damn stringent testing and reliability requirements.
+1 Disagree
They are complaining about "It's crazy, we buy proprietary [and] we don't understand what it is we're buying into", AFTER the NMCI>/a>?
Which was/is a fiasco, one I had direct experience with, and predictably so before it was started. But they wanted it.
Now they complain. And I'm hoping the General isn't focusing on battlefield systems, cause that's a world of a very different design and build philosophy, and needs change to survive in the modern era.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I enlisted under what the navy calls Advanced Electronics Computer Field. I expected to actually, ya know, work on advanced electronics or computers. Was I in for a shock. Instead, I wasted my early and mid 20's working on 1970's era comm gear. The computer I spent the most time on was the UYK-20 which actually had a PAPER TAPE as the primary method of input. I actually envisioned working on modern equipment. The newest piece of gear I got to work on was the R-2368 receiver.
God I wish I could sue the navy for false advertising. Fuck them.
This, ten times over. There is a reason why mission-critical stuff isn't messed with in the airplanes and such. This isn't iphone app that can die in a number of ways with no real fallout beyond buyer posting an angry comment.
Most of military hardware and software is at least half-generation behind the corporate one. Why? Because it's done to military standard, where failure is not an option, unlike corporate where failure is a number that it costs to fix the problem caused by failure divided by likelihood of failure.
And proofing to from corporate to military standard raises both costs and time to make a working solution through the roof.
For the most part, the military wouldn't really have to contribute back to open source. The GPL only requires distribution of source if the binary is distributed. However for the purposes of distribution an organization is considered one entity. So if an organization (such as the military) chose to create a derivative work of some open source software purely for internal use, they wouldn't have to give anyone the source. I would imagine that most military developed software would be for internal use only.
OTOH, the military has in fact contributed to open source in the past. The DoD supported projects like OpenBSD for a long time. It would be nice to see more of that.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Gee, I wonder why no one was listening to the /.ers ten years ago when we were basically warning anyone who held still for long enough that buy-in == lock-in.
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Defense is a sector where free markets dont play a role. I am absolutely sure: If you have a small startup which implements a brilliant system, you would go bankrupt before you are allowed to link it to the systems of the big guys. Then they would buy the rest of that startup for nothing.
I worked for the Marine Corps Systems Command (Quantico, VA) and tried mightily to move the Corps to inexpensive open systems and protocols. I don't know where General Cartwright was at the time, but the Marine Corps leadership did not look kindly on my attempts to implement solutions to the problems the General states exist. The General was quoted as saying "... we buy proprietary [and] we don't understand what it is we're buying into," My direct experience says this not a true statement. The Marine Corps understands to the highest degree that they are buying proprietary, closed, expensive systems. That's precisely what they specified, so that's exactly what they get. If anyone in this forum thinks that the Marine Corps leadership lacked sage advice or that nobody was willing to put their career on the line to get the leadership on the right path, you are mistaken.
The DOD procured Ada which became a standard in 83, much improved in 95. For _critical embedded systems_, it is a very suitable language. Also very suitable if you are thinking of changing the hardware on which it runs.. perhaps a 30+ year military project might involve a change of platform at some point? Civilian contractors didn't like it, presumably because it wasn't fashionable. (Anyone who can write a program in C is clever enough to learn Ada within a month. It's a question of will.) And the customer (supposedly "always right") eventually caved in and no longer mandated it, presumably on short-term cost grounds. Just one example of the government/military not knowing enough to make a stand.
I'm all for smaller is better, but turning 50 government people to 50 contractors really doesn't make government smaller.
I don't want jobs simply turned over to contractors... I don't want any military duties turned over to contractors at all. My point, more directly would be "why is a Marine doing a job that a sailor should be doing"? Traditionally, the Navy provided whatever support Marines needed. But in today's environment, the Marines get their own programmers, cooks, accountants, etc, simply so they can be more "independent" from the Navy. But they were never supposed to be independent from the Navy. They're Marines, after all.
That kind of "He's got it so I want it too" attitude is a huge reason for that growth in government.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I think the General's request is perfectly reasonable. It's merely hard to accomplish - but the Marines do things that are quite hard to accomplish on a regular basis. Automated testing does wonders for flexibility - and every place I've ever worked has said they wanted more automated testing, but didn't back that up with resources. In avionics, where I suspect testing is the majority of the process, there are probably big wins to be had here by adopting selected ideas from Agile development.
I'd think that, given enough effort, everything short of a test pilot doing the final phase of testing could be automated, or at least more automated than it is today.
Also, I'd bet a lot of that "$300MM to change anything" is the problem common to most of government today: the contractors that win contracts are those best at gaming the procurement system.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
And yet they have more stringent certification requirements. US Military aircraft are some of the safest, most well maintained in the world.
I currently work as an Air Force civilian and the biggest single problem is the crazy accreditation process. We would LOVE to use the best and newest open source programs and utilities to do our jobs but we are stuck using technology from 5-6 years ago because the accreditation process was intentionally created by contractors to be as complex as possible so that only they were qualified to get anything approved. (Job security anyone?) Got a great new product that would save 1,000 lives and countless millions? It *might* be fast tracked and only take 2 years to get approved.... The system IS a mess and our adversaries don't have to deal with it - they can use the best equipment and software immediately....
The hidden military is ran by the most top notch scientists in the world working on back engineering technology either not from earth, or hidden technology on each that was discovered using our tax dollars (but we don't get to see anything from this research, it trickles down over the years)
You're kidding, right? While the idea that the government has a UFO from Roswell sounds cool and like a great movie plot, if they really had been reverse-engineering UFO technology, don't you think we'd have seen some more concrete results of that work by now, especially after all these decades? What modern technology can you possibly point to that was from UFOs, rather than something obviously invented by humans with no outside help?
Some people like to argue that our rate of technological progress is obvious evidence of such a "conspiracy" (though a positive one, rather than your typical negative one). But mankind has had a very high rate of technological progress ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution, way before anyone was talking about UFOs. Just look at the changes in technology between 1900 and 1945: airplanes invented, jet engines/airplanes invented, radio, radar, the list goes on and on. In fact, many tech areas have been progressing much more slowly in the last 50 years, namely aviation. Except for lower cost, crappy or absent meals, and much smaller seating space, and of course getting irradiated or molested at the airport, there's little difference between flying a commercial plane from NY to London now versus 30 years ago. In fact, it was probably a shorter trip back then, as they're more worried about fuel economy now. The biggest change is probably that the airplane now has GPS navigation, and some fancy-looking glass-panel displays.
I think that the operational flight software in an airplane should have to go though some kind of review as the last thing you want is a BSOD taking out the system in when the plane is in flight.
The basic idea of Ada.
Is it world war 4 already? Thankfully I seem to have slept through WW3.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The technology we have today is part of the problem. It simply does not allow the easy storage and retrieval of information. When I say "easy", I mean as easy as storage being "here are the data" and retrieval being "give me such and such data". There is a tremendous amount of work required to make information available for storage and retrieval.
The core issue of the problem is that there is not a single standard protocol about information. Each database, application and operating system speaks its own language. If platforms had a standard component with a standardized language for storing and retrieving information, the work would be much easier for the army (or any large organization).
Let's speak of a hypothetical example which demonstrates the problem. Let's take Star Trek: the Starfleet uses a common data protocol all throughout its ships. Imagine if each ship used its own protocol, or worse, if every department of each ship used their own protocol! absolute mayhem, absolute bureaucracy. Starships like the USS Enterprise or Voyager would need 50% of its crew to be programmers, just to cater for the needs of various departments on board!!!
Taking the example to the extreme, let's consider the Borg from Star Trek: all the drones speak the same language, they have the same data protocol. Imagine if, such parts of the collective used different protocols! again, absolute mayhem and absolute bureaucracy.
This problem does not concern only the army, it concerns every IT organization on the planet. That is one of the main reasons projects fail or are late and over budget. If that problem goes away, budgets will see enormous reductions, including the DoD.
You're changing a part. It's an important part but not the whole thing. And it's not like the software is some huge monolithic entity. It has various isolated sub-parts.
So you change a fe lines of code. It goes through several committees, test phases, and several hundred hours of simulated combat flight test. I reralise this can be expensive,. Millions even, but $300 million!? I'm very curious about how that breaks down.
Probably:
$10k coding
$90k testing
$299.9m shuffling paper from one project manager to a quality manager to a process manager to an oversight manager to a test manager to a project manager to a procedure manager to an environments manager to an integration manager to a contractor who does all of the above all over again.
I'm sure there's a 'profit???' in there somewhere :)
who had pointed this out!
oh wait. there was. in the NSA, there were quite a few actually.
Did that guy just say that closed source software is less customizable than open source software?
-- no sig today
i worked for NC3A for a while so became very familiar with this situation, which applies just as well to the local Reservoir Water Supply (which has to be secure!) as it does to Police, Fire and Military. the problems that secure locations have is that both the supplier and the software itself require "vetting". the actual cost of this vetting is itself both significant and time-consuming. i heard of one organisation that was still using python 2.1 in 2007, a full 5 years after it had been retired - it was virtually impossible to find any source code that actually still worked, so everything had to be developed from scratch. and the reason why they were using python 2.1 was very simple: the decision-making process took 1 year; the security-approval process took 6 months; the deployment process took 6 months; the development process took 18 months: after that, there's a 2-3 year maintenance cycle.
also of significance is sheer inertia. in russia, there is an urban myth that their tanks are still using valve-based (vacuum tube) electronics "because they're immune to an EM pulse from a nuclear strike". the truth is far more mundane, ironic and somewhat cynical and funny: supply chains. the cost of developing alternative electronics is not inconsiderable, but the sheer logistics of maintaining two sets of supply chains, the risks associated with down-time on the tanks whilst they're being converted, the cost of training people to carry out the conversion, the time taken to convert an entire army of tanks to the new electronics - it's just sheer madness to even contemplete it. so, russia still makes electronics for these tanks that use technology that was retired by pretty much everyone else in the world over 40 years ago.
so yes - there is a serious, serious problem, but it's very very hard to see exactly what a potential solution is. ultimately it boils down to trust: you *can't* trust just any suppliers nor just any software, and that automatically limits the pace of development (or if you're lucky it merely puts the cost at sky high).
Sure you can, it's called SAP [BBC style voice: other ERP systems are available].
I mean, it worked for the army.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I was quoting TFA. He should hold Navy rank.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Conspiracy theories always amuse me. Tell me, Mr. AC, how much more advanced than us are your space aliens? A hundred years more advanced? Two hundred? A thousand? After all, they're flying interstellar spacecraft at FTL velocities, something that we have no glimmering how to do yet.
So exactly what electronics technology did we reverse-engineer from that crashed flying saucer? Bipolar IC technology? Nope, pretty much obsolete today. Standard bulk CMOS with field oxide isolation? Nope, pretty much obsolete. 2-D gate MOSFETs? Nope, about to be superseded by FinFETs. For that matter, what if we wind up transitioning to nanotech diamond- or carbon-based technology over the next 20 years, making silicon obsolete? Is that what the flying saucer contained? Diamond-based nanotech electronics?
So how did we examine a device far more advanced than anything we have today, yet know how to build its most primitive precursors? Somehow, we were smart enough to infer the entire line of technological development for integrated circuits from a single damaged device, yet were too dumb to figure out how to invent any of it ourselves. It would be like handing a modern cellphone to a man from the 18th century, and expecting him to start building crystal radios and vacuum tube logic gates, but be unable to figure out Ohm's Law on his own.
That, of course, is the essence of any conspiracy theory. The perpetrators must be brilliant geniuses and drooling idiots, both at the same time.
I have some advice for you, Mr. AC. Go to your library, start with the papers written by Clerk Maxwell, and learn some physics by reading some of the literally hundreds of thousands of papers that trace our development of transistors and IC technology. Once you have a glimmering of understanding about modern microelectronics, you may finally realize how laughable the "we got our tech from space aliens" theory really is.
"Hoss" could do something right away - scuttle the "upgrade" to Vista and go straight to Win7. I know, I know, the whole business of using MS in the government is insane, but it would be nice to get to spend less by avoinding some of the criminal insanity,
Servers can be bought off the shelf and Linux is pretty secure. The point is how much hardware and software could a group of geeks provide for 10 billion that would be state of the art and possibly better than state of the art on the software side?
The problem is that you aren't allowed to do "pretty secure" - you have to lock down everything to the point where it doesn't even work, then write detailed justifications for every change that you need in order to use the system.
It's the bloated military contractor system that is keeping them in the stone age and throwing a few hundred billion at their current suppliers will change nothing.
This is a huge part of the problem. Even if you want to do things better you are often explicitly or implicitly forbidden from doing so by law, regulation or corporate policy.
I want my Cowboyneal
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Sorry to keep sounding like a broken record.
Here is a hypothetical parody remix of the Hitler "Downfall" scene:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/32e8fc32c89c96bd
Dialog of alternatively a military officer and Hitler: ... ... now!"
"It looks like there are now local digital fabrication facilities here,
here, and here."
"But we still have the rockets we need to take them out?"
"The rockets have all been used to launch seed automated machine shops for
self-replicating space habitats for more living space in space."
"What about the nuclear bombs?"
"All turned into battery-style nuclear power plants for island cities in the
oceans."
"What about the tanks?"
"The diesel engines have been remade to run biodiesel and are powering the
internet hubs supplying technical education to the rest of the world."
"I can't believe this. What about the weaponized plagues?"
"The gene engineers turned them into antidotes for most major diseases like
malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and river blindness."
"Well, send in the Daleks."
"The Daleks have been re-outfitted to terraform Mars. There all gone with
the rockets."
"Well, use the 3D printers to print out some more grenades."
"We tried that, but they only are printing toys, food, clothes, shelters,
solar panels, and more 3D printers, for some reason."
"But what about the Samsung automated machine guns?"
"They were all reprogrammed into automated bird watching platforms. The guns
were taken out and melted down into parts for agricultural robots."
"I just can't believe this. We've developed the most amazing technology the
world has ever known in order to create artificial scarcity so we could rule
the world through managing scarcity. Where is the scarcity?"
"Gone, Mein Fuhrer, all gone. All the technologies we developed for weapons
to enforce scarcity have all been used to make abundance."
"How can we rule without scarcity? Where did it all go so wrong?
Everyone with an engineering degree leave the room
[Cue long tirade on the general incompetence of enginee
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What relevance has that got to anything I posted?
You're out by one war and several thousand feet of altitude.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."