Software for Army's wireless warfare

Washington Post:

hostlist.6223.soscoe.c16.

That line of code, like modern-day hieroglyphics, flashes on a flat screen in a classified Boeing plant under the studious gaze of the warriors of the future: software developers, one with spiked hair, another who looks too young to vote. They are working on the largest software program in Defense Department history, a project that the military says dwarfs Microsoft's Windows. The project is the heart of Future Combat Systems, the Army's most expensive weapons program.

"There's nothing like it, ever," said Loren B. Thompson, a defense consultant at the Lexington Institute, a public policy think tank. "Nobody has ever before attempted to integrate a software system as remotely complicated as FCS is going to be. It is many times more complicated than any other defense program."

Future Combat Systems, or FCS, is a roughly $200 billion weapons program that military officials consider the most thorough modernization of the Army since World War II. It all depends on the software, under development by the Army's battalion of contractors, led by Boeing. The software is intended to do what military commanders have until now only dreamed about: give soldiers the power to communicate through a wireless network in near real time with hovering drones; remotely control robots to defuse bombs; fire laser-guided missiles at enemies on the move; and conduct a video teleconference in a tank rumbling about 40 mph in the haze of battle.

The Army is counting on such an advantage by linking weapons through the software system that it is reducing the heavy armor on planned combat vehicles, reasoning that soldiers will be better able to detect and strike the enemy first.

"Magic under the hood" is what Boeing engineer Paul D. Schoen, one of the project leaders, calls the software. Others in the military call it Windows on steroids. John Williams, a chisel-jawed sergeant stationed at the Boeing plant who has served in both wars with Iraq, isn't interested in what it's called. "Soldiers don't care about software," he said. What they care about is "if it's going to work."

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Congressional investigators are also concerned that the lines of code have nearly doubled since development began in 2003. And they question the Army's oversight of a far-flung project involving more than 2,000 developers and dozens of contractors working across the nation, including in Clear Lake, Tex.; Huntsville, Ala.; Philadelphia, Mesa, Ariz.; Red Bank, N.J.; Seattle; and here, in Southern California, in an old rocket factory.

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Part of the complexity is that developers are creating about a fifth of the software for the weapons program, the GAO estimates; for the rest, they are stitching together software from other military programs and buying more than half of it from the commercial sector. But the federal agency noted in a report last year that "the amount of software code to be written -- already an unprecedented undertaking -- continues to grow," underscoring that the toughest part of developing software is usually in the last 10 percent. The risk is that the software may not be developed by the time the combat vehicles and weapons are ready, the GAO cautions.

Military experts also worry about hackers, viruses and the possibility that the software will fail in battle, because Future Combat Systems reduces the amount of heavy armor on combat vehicles on the assumption that the technology will let soldiers see first, then strike first.

"How many times does your computer system go down in a week?" said Jim Currie, a retired Army reserve colonel, military historian and professor at the National Defense University.

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Another software difficulty is the operating system, which is being developed by Boeing. The System-of-Systems Common Operating Environment, or SOSCOE, is supposed to be like Windows, the world's dominant operating system, only better. It will be embedded in the 14 combat vehicles, robots, drones, sensors and weapons that comprise Future Combat Systems, helping soldiers to communicate with the different systems through a wireless network using radios, relays and satellites.

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.

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There is much more.

I am skeptical of many aspects of this program. The computers on board the space shuttle were out of date before its first flight. By the time it flew, home PCs were more powerful. That is one of the things that the system will have to deal with. Then there is the threat of hackers becoming the new RPGs. To guard against that, elaborate software will have to be added to the system which will slow its operation and make it less responsive. You see it already on your PC the way internet security programs degrade performance and interfere with operations.

Bill Gates writes today in the Wall Street Journal about the innovations that are coming in the computer environment in the next few years. Will the military's system be so proprietary that it will not be able to use them without substantial cost?