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Work Progressing on Army's Future Combat Systems
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Jan 25, 2008 01:59 AM
from the enjoy-debugging-that dept.
from the enjoy-debugging-that dept.
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."
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U.S. Army's Future Combat System Will Run Linux 742 comments
jkastner writes "In 2001 Boeing was chosen to be the lead system integrator for the Army's Future Combat System. The bumper sticker description of this project is 'see first, understand first, act first and finish decisively,' and while Boeing's official FCS site doesn't have a lot of technical details, but you can find some good information at Global Security. To quote their page, "FCS is envisioned as a networked 'system of systems" that will include robotic reconnaissance vehicles and sensors; tactical mobile robots; mobile command, control and communications platforms; networked fires from futuristic ground and air platforms; and advanced three-dimensional targeting systems operating on land and in the air.' The Phase 2 request for proposals just appeared and the estimated price is $26 billion
through fiscal year 2009. The fact that the Army is spending billions of dollars on a project isn't anything new, but a little known fact is that the OS for FCS will be Linux (FAQ 4 here.)"
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Zombie (Score:2, Funny)
OR (Score:5, Funny)
Tech Officer: "Coming sir, we're having some dependency problems..."
Parent
Re:OR (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
And Appropriately (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And Appropriately (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Parent
Re:And Appropriately (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Why military computer projects turn to crap (Score:3, Informative)
For anyone who wonders why a lot of military software projects (but not all) turn to crap, as the parent posters allude to, read War Upon The Map [mit.edu].
IMHO, This is the most insightful paper into the deep interworkings of DoD politics and how it influences software design. I've experienced this myself and what the parent posters say does not surprise me in the least.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Now, let's read the article.
Re:And Appropriately (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:And Appropriately (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:And Appropriately (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because the world is also full of people who all share a common desire to be the alpha-male, and control what everyone else does, says, reads, eats, fucks, and even thinks. And those people would put a serious hurtin' on sheep like you if you didn't have a military and police force to protect you. Whether you like it or not, it IS a dog-eat-dog world out there. Playing ostrich isn't going to change that fact.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This "corrupt government" nonsense really gets to me. The US government is quite possibly one of the least corrupt governments on the planet, yet you act as if you're currently under the boot of the Fourth Reich. Give your head a shake!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And Appropriately (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Oh please... (Score:4, Funny)
Anthropomorphizing technology is rather misleading... especially in this case, "when death is on the line!"
Re:Oh please... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
BSOD tradeoff. (Score:5, Funny)
Game (Score:2)
Re:Game (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Born to Kill (Score:5, Funny)
db
This is great! (Score:3, Funny)
Licensed to kill (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But killing puppies with linux is okay? (Score:2)
How about fluffy kittens? Aliens? Dolphins? How about the biosphere?
What about the use of linux in a somekind of euthanasia device or do you get to dictate how other people should life and die their own lives?
Offcourse your suggestion is silly and goes against the very spirit of opensource.
Re:Licensed to kill (Score:5, Informative)
Why?
Take WWII as an example, you've got a whole bunch of Japanese moving east killing 3M Chinese soldiers defending their homeland, murdering 17M unarmed Chinese civilians mainly with swords and small arms. Germans get in on the action, invading Czechoslovakia and Poland. They get bored and ramp up action invading Scandinavia, France and the Soviet Union killing 23M soviets (half civilian) while they were at it. Jews of course were shot on site or sent to an automated death factory, 3M all up. The Germans start bombing the crap out of the UK and the Japanese exploit the distraction and invade Singapore, capturing the defenders then starve or torture them to death in prison camps. This was the bad kind of killing, because they were killing because they desired more power.
But we all know this story and what happened next. The British Commonwealth, U.S. and Soviet Union killed a truly amazing amount of people and fixed the problem. It is completely thanks to violence that German and Japanese people are now nice rather than nasty. The US military helped get the Japanese out of China / South East Asia and the Germans out of the bulk of Europe and thus prevented them from killing any more people while they were there. This was the good kind of killing because they only started killing when they had killers to kill and they always aimed to make peace when the killers were killed. I bet you can't think of any non-violent organisation that cut short such an evil set of events.
This is why violence is only bad if you're violent to the wrong people and why I wholly endorse any of my works to be used for violence against the right people. It's not as if the Third Reich or Japanese empire would have cared about your stipulations. If someone did honour it, they must be the sort of people who care about individual freedoms and intellectual property and thus those who you'd probably want to win the conflict anyway.
Of course the problem is that the military forces of the US and my native Australia spends most of its time invading irrelevant countries to look like it is dealing with terrorists, but that does not mean that its role in the world is wholly a negative one, they beat up a lot of bad people too, like the Taliban who had it coming to them long before they helped hide Osama bin Laden. Our Aussie guys went over and kept away a bunch of armed militia that was trying to stop East Timor from regaining its independence, NATO did some bombing to stop the Serbs from killing the Muslims in Kosovo. When the military isn't killing people you get things like the Rwandan genocide in the mid 90s when nobody got around to killing the aggressors so they were able to kill whomever the hell they wanted.
Thus, killing in general is a completely morally neutral action.
Parent
Re:Licensed to kill (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
While you imply that violence was effective and valid against him, I say that it never would have been necessary in the first place, were he not out for genocide. Also, a lot of his inspiration was WWI, and Germany's spectacular defeat.
It's kind of a silly argument, but perhaps the pacifist's realize that while they cannot control other's actions, they can control their own and NOT be Hitler. Not everything is about some evil
Mod parent down... (Score:3, Insightful)
It quenches any discussion , because no one dares to disagree.
If parent want's to partake in a discussion, try to counter the argument with something more sensible and wise - on the same level as the argument-giver.
Good for them! (Score:2)
Blame game (Score:5, Funny)
hey! (Score:4, Funny)
Several years of development... (Score:2, Funny)
Lines of Code? (Score:4, Insightful)
FCS Should be Cancelled (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
And back when semi-auto rifles were introduced, soliders didn't think it was worth the extra weight and hassle over their good old bolt-action rifles.
And back when muskets were introduced, soldiers didn't think it was worth the extra weight and hassle over their good old lances and calvary sabres.
And back when long swords were introduced, soldiers didn't think it was worth the extra weight and hassle over
Re:Uptime? (Score:5, Informative)
Just ssh user@host uptime.
SSH does not perform a real "login" (in the sense of allocating a pty and writing in utmp) when specifying a remote command to execute. Thus, havin zero users loggged in is normal in that case. Try it yourself.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Insightful? (Score:5, Informative)
The software in question will never see the public Internet because it's all classified Secret and above. Well, the data and operating environment are. The kernel itself will be unclass but FOUO, most likely, so that could conceivably be contributed back out if something interesting were in it. My guess is that there won't be. Military systems, even the classified variety, tend to be very vanilla by commercial standards and rarely have interesting features. It is how they are deployed that makes them redundant or otherwise suitable for their task.
So expecting contributions back will be kind of
This isn't the first military program to use Linux as a basis, btw. Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and Below (FBCB2) uses a RTOS optimized kernel for its work, having converted from Solaris.
That said, DA has a huge Microsoft ELA contract which everyone is pushed towards. So I don't expect a lot of OSS innovation from the Army.
Parent
Re:Insightful? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been hoping for some insightful comments, not being a Linux geek. Can anyone say anything about the wider implications. I'm not US competent. I guess the US Military is essentially a model of a well run business.
If you're looking for wider implications that you may already have missed, look up the term "second sourcing" -- an invention of the US Department of Defense. The US Department of Defense has had an history of requiring its suppliers to have a "second source" of critical parts should one supplier/manufacturer fail to deliver for some reason. For instance, AMD wouldn't be where it is today if Intel, its competitor and arch enemy, wouldn't have shared so much information and even crucial training to make sur