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U.S. Army's Future Combat System Will Run Linux
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Mar 01, 2003 09:22 PM
from the projects-always-get-scrapped-and-revised dept.
from the projects-always-get-scrapped-and-revised dept.
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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money saving technique (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:money saving technique (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:money saving technique (Score:5, Funny)
I knew we were allies with the brits, but isn't this getting carried away?
Re:money saving technique (Score:5, Funny)
I knew we were allies with the brits, but isn't this getting carried away?
I imagine it's something to do with the US Army using Paypal to pay for it. Maybe they got carried away bidding against Saddam for that 'leet "Leenix" thing on ebay.
Re:money saving technique (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: money saving technique (Score:5, Informative)
Major General Smedley Butler, USMC. [fas.org]
I find him a bit more authoritative than the man who said "a little bit of hypocrisy is a good thing" when it comes to life and death issues.
Re: money saving technique (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:money saving technique (Score:5, Insightful)
That works out to about $5 per person... One meal at McDonalds. About the only health care you can do for that is a pack of bandaids.
Re:money saving technique (Score:3, Insightful)
26 billion goes a long, long, way in the 3rd world
Re:money saving technique (Score:3, Informative)
you mean $26 billion *more* than we already give.
military spending isn't for developing nations. in case you haven't noticed lately, we do have hostiles which we need to protect ourselves from.
Re:money saving technique (Score:5, Informative)
Six bucks per person would inoculate them against the major killing diseases, and provide vitamins for a year, which in turn would prevent numerous nutrional deficiency diseases and ailments.
And if need be, we could set boundaries for help. There's little point in spending six bucks on a single elderly starvation victim who's body is so ravaged that s/he'll only live another few months anyway, when that six bucks could make a life-or-death difference to a dozen children.
$26 billion would also be more than enough to provide contraceptive options to every third-world woman. Reducing the birth rates would allow us to, in following years, provide better health care and nutrition care to the children. And with the children growing up healthier, the long-term consequences would be even further reduced ill health.
The long and the short of it is pretty damn plain:
We can spend $26 billion killing a bunch of people, causing the survivors to despise us even more.
Or we can spend $26 billion saving a bunch of people, and helping bring peace to earth.
I know which I'd rather see.
Re:money saving technique (Score:4, Insightful)
And if we do that, some petty dictator will take the food and keep it from getting to the starving nobodies we're trying to feed.
We'd be better off spending the money on the troops, and then using them to enforce every UN decree that there is. Warlords causing human suffering? US leads the way to stop them. Need to distribute food fairly? US donates military to guard the food and keep it from getting stolen & hoarded.
And, of course, $26 billion is only about $3 for every inhabitant of the planet. I suspect that "global free healthcare" would cost a bit more than that.
Re:money saving technique (Score:5, Insightful)
There is *displaced* cost food and health care.
What would make a lot more sense than throwing away this $26 billion, acomplishing little to nothing, would be to devise systems allowing people to provide their own food and health care.
If, however, we merely feed people who live where producing food is inherently impossible, but the population expands exponentially with the food supply, the more we feed them the worse off *they* are.
You can't solve social problems by writing a check.
KFG
Re:money saving technique (Score:3)
Re:money saving technique (Score:5, Insightful)
Millions are starving where you can't even grow hemp, without even getting into the current social problems involved with growing hemp.
As for setting up factories there is no particular current demand for the goods they could produce. Production in most fields now being in excess of demand. Labor becomes less valuable every year. The problem of raw production has been *solved.*
The problem of *distribution* in a world where the population is growing but the need for, and thus the value of, labor is diminishing, is still an open question with no resolution in sight.
Often times the only logical solution is simply relocating the people. Millions of them. The social and *politcal* problems involved in that are outrageous, although the movement could be accomplished at little monetary cost.
Take the case of Bangladesh. A poor and desperate country, that shall always remain poor and desperate so long as it continues to exist. Nothing can be done about it. Nothing.
And yet they live on the most fertile land in all the world.
They built their entire country, insisted on such political autonomy in fact, directly on the delta of one of the greatest flooding rivers in the world. Great for growing rice. Impossible to live on build on, make any sort of infrastructure whatever on.
In the "old days" Bangladesh was simply a region of India. When the floods came you planted your rice shoots and then ran uphill until they subsided, then went back and havested your rice, You ate what you needed and sold the excess on the Indian market.
Now there is an international frontier where "uphill" used to be.
There really is only one solution, for Bangladesh to reintegrate with India. No amount of money in the world will solve the poverty and miserable conditions much of the nation finds itself living under.
Hundreds of millions of acres, right here in the rich and good old USA, are essentially unsuitable for human habitation, and are thus almost entire uninhabited.
In other nations, usually for purely social and political reasons, people are forced to live in these places.
Take all the inhabitants of NYC and transport them to the middle of the Painted Dessert and telling them grow hemp (illegal, social and political issue) or build a factory they can labor in is *not* going to be a solution to their problems of existence. Even in the long term.
(And yes, part of the problems that NYC faces with overpopulation and poverty is because it has been rendered into a place unfit for human habitation. There is as much hunger in NYC as there is in many "deprived" areas of the world. That is *also* a social and political problem, not a food supply one, since at any given moment in NYC the food supply exceeds that needed by all of its residents)
KFG
Re:money saving technique (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe their logic is along the lines of "An under-defended war will cause far more healthcare and food issues than 26 bill would solve."
Re:money saving technique (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted we sure could use universal healthcare and food for everyone. But even if we had that we would still need to continue to spend massive amounts of money to develop superior weapons systems just so that we are prepared should war be forced upon us.
The money would need to be spent here regardless of where other moneys may be spent. Its one of the prices of freedom
Re:money saving technique (Score:5, Insightful)
Your argument is "we haven't enough to feed the world so it's ok to blow it on crap". If we invested this sort of money regularly in these countries, they'd feed *themselves*. They *do* have sunshine, soil, water and seed. It's just hard to grow food when your fields have been napalmed.
new recruits (Score:4, Funny)
What the f*** (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What the f*** (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What the f*** (Score:4, Funny)
Bittersweet news (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, I think that more than a few hackers will feel a twinge of sadness when they see footage of some people being blown up. Doesn't exactly make you want to point and say "oh look see, that was my code they used to send the `fire' command to that unit..." Especially if it is one of those not-declared-or-debated sort of wars that we seem to be getting into these days.
Re:Bittersweet news (Score:3, Insightful)
Not necessarily. There is nowhere in the GPL that forces you to give away your source to the world - it only forces you to distribute (or make easily available) the source to those that you are selling/giving the binaries. So, unless Boeing plans on giving us their software (ya right!), we won't benefit at all. Rather, all of the donated work is benefiting a profiting corporation without any form of compensation. This is where the GPL fails IMHO.
Re:Bittersweet news (Score:3, Interesting)
unless Boeing plans on giving us their software (ya right!), we won't benefit at all.
What makes you say that Boeing would write a GPL program for the DOD? Just because a program runs on top of Linux doesn't mean it has to be GPL'd. They will probably use the NSA version of Linux and any bugs they fix in the OS itself would have to be disclosed and that is a good thing because it will make all Linux systems more secure.
Rather, all of the donated work is benefiting a profiting corporation without any form of compensation. This is where the GPL fails IMHO.
It is the BSD license that allows code to be reused in a proprietary program which your employer Miscroft has taken advantage of many times. I'm curious, do you get paid to spread FUD or is this just "donated work"?
Re:Bittersweet news (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right about what the GPL requires you to do. Boeing is going to be required to make the source code for any changes to the Linux kernel available to the DOD, but they don't have to make these changes available to the rest of us. They are also perfectly free to create proprietary software that runs on top of Linux.
My guess, however, is that most of the changes to the Linux kernel itself will make its way back to Linus and friends, and the reason for this is simple. Maintaining your own fork of the Linux kernel is hard, and such a beast would have very few benefits. After all, one of the reasons that these folks chose Linux in the first place is that it would allow them to offload some of their work on the rest of the Linux kernel developers. If secrecy were the primary goal they would simply write their own OS from scratch. What's the point of using Linux if you are going to distance yourself from all of the neat stuff being done by the rest of the kernel developers?
Re:Bittersweet news (Score:3, Insightful)
If they don't want to redo all the work the next time they want to upgrade the kernel, they will. If they don't mind passing over that the auditing task to the Department of Redundency Department, they will not release their changes.
Re:Know thy enemy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Know thy enemy? (Score:3, Informative)
They would have to provide access to the code to people they distribute binaries to. Of course that is probably not the general public.
They'll have to overload (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory RMS joke (Score:5, Funny)
Slogan: (Score:3, Funny)
SON OF A BITCH! (Score:5, Funny)
TWENTY-NINE BILLION DOLLARS? (That's dollars, right? Not pesos or something?)
Somebody had better tell the Army that Linux is free and they're getting ripped off big time!
Re:SON OF A BITCH! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SON OF A BITCH! (Score:3, Insightful)
Say bye-bye with EMP (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.wsmr.army.mil/paopage/Pages/WU%2312.
As advanced as many armies are in the world the advent of more and more electronic warfare systems, innovation will bring on more portable and potent EMP weapons. There's always a rub.
Re:Say bye-bye with EMP (Score:5, Informative)
When I went into the Army in 1991, no Army unit had executed a bayonet charge since World War II, but we still learned to fight with them attached to the M-16. There's all sorts of high tech gadgetry that can help you kill the enemy deader than shit...but you still learn to do it with bayonet, bare hands, and rifle with iron-sights before you ever learn to call in MLRS fire or pull down realtime data from a Predator drone...
$29,000,000,000 (Score:5, Funny)
And why just Linux? That script is portable to any flavor of Unix!
Time for a new topic icon? (Score:4, Funny)
They'd better (Score:4, Informative)
For such a system, linux is the obvious choice IMHO. Here's why: Consider the possibility of a malicious agent (possibly an insider) gaining unauthorized access to some of the systems. Because the whole thing is networked and remotely coordinated, the possibility for damage is immense. In that case, it is absolutely essential to detect the intrusion, track the attacker's footprints and minimize the damage as quickly as possible. And I would say linux wins hands down at this, because of its transparency. The main thing is not cost or ease of use or applications or any of the things that are usually considered, but having the innards of the system open for the administrator to see.
New Device Drivers (Score:5, Funny)
I can see it now on the Kernel mailing list - a bunch of new developers with
Hey Linus - this one gives improved target acquisition for the Patriot II antimissle. If you want you can come see the live tests in Iraq.
So the rumors are true... (Score:5, Funny)
It's the end for America (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It's the end for America (Score:5, Insightful)
Deathbringers! (Score:5, Funny)
You liberals should be firmly backing Microsoft at this point... Windows is the ultimate anti-war software... I mean, how can you bomb the hell out of innocent civilians when your missile launch systems crash when you push the launch button!
But noooooo... with Linux, this'll never happen, and we can kill all the people we want with no doubt our systems will function properly.
Yeah, good job penguin-heads!
(In case there is any doubt, tongue is firmly planted in cheek here)
War, Linux, and Microsoft (dark humor) (Score:3, Funny)
--Tina Russell thinks you're typing a letter. Would you like to go to the Bomb Iraqi Peasants Wizard?
This wedding party has committed an illegal operation...
Oh, great. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, great. They're building SkyNet.
All robots. All automated. All computer controlled. And they're using Linux. Who'd have thought lil' Tux would eventually bring about the end of civilization? Linux's reliability means that SkyNet will become self-aware and overthrow the humans many years sooner than it would otherwise have done. At least if they ran Windoze we could rest assured that it would eventually collapse due to bluescreens or worms/viruses. But it's running Linux and will therefore be undefeatable. I fear the end is near...
$28B over 7 Years? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Land-Warrior gear that the Special Ops use was originally a GD contract. They wrote custom software to work the gear; the program and gear failed misserably. Then, a few small companies in California took Windows CE, a CE PDA, wrote some custom drivers and hardware mods and you have a very useful system that is used today. Although Windows was chosen, the point is to the DOD that COTS works and has been pushed as the right thought for system development up to the highest generals. It is only natural that this time defense integrators choose the RIGHT technology for the job.
I don't know where most posters to this thread are from, but $26B is chump change. With a $350 Billion defense budget a year that is only $4B a year or 1.1% of the annual budget.
The US produces more food than can be eaten. We air drop for FREE billions of tons of food for third world nations.
Furthermore, you all have to realize that the only reason UN demands are NOW being executed and inspectors are NOW back in Iraq is b/c there are 200,000 US Troops with the billion dollar toys effectively saying "you have no choice, you couldn't disarm on your own in the late 90's and we're tired of taking shit, disarm or get distroyed." A fair statement IMHO.
With Nations like N.Korea just trying to cause problems; Mind you a nation that doesn't have a spare volt to power a palm handheld, or food to keep its people alive (YES we are airdropping food to them as well), is building nukes to "shakedown" the asian community??? It is countries such as N.Korea that force the US to build $26 Billion dollar army combat systems to defend the rest of Aisa and Europe (minus the UK-they are pretty damn tough).
[begin Sarcasim_time]
But if you would rather the US to give that $26B in small-bills to third-world nations, OK we'll do it, and at the same time pull our fleet of aircrat carries over to the UK, Spain, Italy (short list of our supportrs) and protect only them from evil dictatorships and let the rest of you all die horrible nuclear and chemical weapon deaths.
[end Sarcasim_time]
All this idological talk about peace is nice but if you are typing on a computer, you should have the intelligence to realzie that the real world doesn't have people that want peace. As cyclic as economic markets are, so cyclic are the ideals of dictators.
In the 1940's you had Hitler, 1960's was the Cold War, and now you have Terrorists and distructive regiemes. I feel much better paying a few hundreds bucks for my health insurance and knowing my government is doing all that is necessary to ensure the future of free (as in beer and freedom) people will carry on.
It is the embedded systems (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows is currently better than Linux in a few (unfortunatly critical areas), but even that is changing quickly. And in the embedded market, Microsoft's products really are niche products, while it is Linux, DOS, and a few other products that are the best products for most projects.
Of course in general server software, I have to say I *much* prefer Linux. For client programs I use Linux mostly (as well as XP occasionally) but even over the last six months, there have been incredible improvements made in many critical areas. Give it another couple years, and I suspect that Linux will be *the* corporate desktop of choice.
Re:Revoke DOD's linux license (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all about freedom remember?
A while back someone did suggest a variation on the GPL which would rule out various sorts of immoral use (I think they had dictatorial regimes in mind) but I don't know whether it caught on at all.