Work Progressing on Army's Future Combat Systems

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."

Zombie

Damn, I was looking forward to zombie soldiers.

OR

General: "Where are my tanks!?"
Tech Officer: "Coming sir, we're having some dependency problems..."

Re:OR

Tech Officer: "Anyway, now that we're compiling them with -O3, the enemy won't stand a chance, sir!"

And Appropriately

Yes. It does run Linux.

Re:And Appropriately

You guys would be appalled at the bad software that's in this thing. From a bizarrely dysfunctional display system to a completely unstable and ever changing target OS. Yes, it runs linux but Boeing has decided that linux isn't good enough and is rolling out their own operating environment that we're all forced to use.

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...

Re:And Appropriately

Be VERY afraid. FCS/SoSCOE (System of Systems Common Operating Environment) is your worst, worst nightmare. It all squats upon an antiquated CORBA infrastructure and is the most bloated, incredibly poorly engineered PoS that has ever been birthed by an aerospace contractor. And I should know. As chief architect for the Common Operating System component of DARPA's J-UCAS program, we fought Boeing long and hard over their insistence that this architecture form the basis of the J-UCAS software infrastructure. While the idea stems from the long-running quest within the DoD to develop a true cross-service network-centric software architecture, it was built by people who completely ignored the last 15 years of lessons learned about large scale distributed systems from the Internet. It has multiple single points of failure baked into the architecture, requires outrageous amounts of RAM and CPU power to run (making it incredibly unsuitable for embedded systems use), and is licensed in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to obtain and modify without Boeing's involvement.

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?

Re:

You make a great set of points.
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 t

Re:

I dunno the genesis of the "open source" meme with this FCS story. The SoSCOE code I worked with wasn't made of very much open source stuff. In fact, the initial versions weren't even aimed at Linux. The crap all ran on SGI boxes. So to the extent that the

Why military computer projects turn to crap

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 sof

Re:

Damn right, and just as my linux computer here it can heal its connection withing seconds without booting! Anybody here use Windows? Loosers!!!

Now, let's read the article.

Re:And Appropriately

The job of the army is not to "prevent" future combat, but to prepare for it and execute if if needed. The diplomatic job of preventing it falls to... well, diplomats and politicians.

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.

Re:And Appropriately

I'm not worried about our diplomats carrying insufficient clout. I am worried about the victims of our numerous pointless wars in the past and present. I do not see the world as a giant game of monopoly where we are endlessly seeking to increase our power and wealth. The world is full of people who all share a common desire to live a happy and fulfilling life, yet millions die for the pointless greedy ambitions of a few powerful men. As people gifted with technical skills we cannot let ourselves be blinded to what is going on in the world, for an opportunity to play with expensive toys and use our skills to develop weapons that kill innocent people. We cannot afford to have a frail grasp on how our actions fit into the bigger picture when a few lines of code can be part of a machine used to murder for political ambition.

Re:And Appropriately

I do not see the world as a giant game of monopoly where we are endlessly seeking to increase our power and wealth.

That's your own problem. Why should the government let your naiveté influence policy? If you want to stick your head in the dirt and ignore the rest of the world, fine, but the rest of us will go on seeking to constantly increase our knowledge, wealth, productivity, and power. Maybe you've got some metaphysical touchy-feely answer as to what the purpose of life is, but for me, and billions like me, it's achieving as much as I possibly can today, and improving as much as I possibly can tomorrow.

The world is full of people who all share a common desire to live a happy and fulfilling life, yet millions die for the pointless greedy ambitions of a few powerful men.

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.

Re:

When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred.

...

And if it be urged that whoever is armed will act in the same way, whe

Re:

You are asking for a simple yes or no answer to a complex question. America's worldwide military presence has a complex history. Historically (prior to the second world war), the US had a weak, minimalistic military; essentially just a middleweight navy

Re:

The United States has a corrupt government, where people are lied to and brainwashed into supporting wars for the personal ambitions of a few wealthy men, not the benefit or defense of the nation. We are ALL responsible for letting this happen, and have a

Re:

The United States has a corrupt government

As opposed to what nation? North Korea? China?

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

Re:

I agree with the first, that it's simply not the job of the army to prevent combat. But if "military strength, like economic clout, is an asset on the scorecard of diplomatic maneuver" maybe it's got something to do with what diplomacy is about? I mean the

Re:

Money is not a physical thing, it's a political, or a social thing. And that's why physical thoughts on growth don't help with your question. Second: money was not "invented", and it doesn't serve the humans. How comes the money when it was not invented? I

Re:And Appropriately

When the only thing you have is an army, all problems looks like wars.

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.

Re:

By the sounds of it, i'd say this was written by someone who sat in on a "Future Combat Systems for Dummies" presentation. I'd imagine the "healing" process is equivalent to services restarting themselves when they fail.

Re:

We're not talking about being able to save a word document here. In order for the soldiers on the ground to have full situational awareness and ability to command, there is a lot of data that has to get from here to there. If you have a direct link from

Oh please...

software will automatically "heal itself," retrieving the information

Anthropomorphizing technology is rather misleading... especially in this case, "when death is on the line!"

Re:Oh please...

To top it off, this news comes from a group who actually DID start a land war in Asia.

BSOD tradeoff.

So by avoiding Windows, no BSOD on the battlefield. But instead we risk a Colonel Panic? (sorry)

Game

Would you like to play a game of Global Thermonuclear War?

Re:Game

As I recall, the computer very much wanted to play chess, not war. In a beautiful commentary on human stupidity and aggression it was the person who forced the computer to play war. It was the point of the movie.

Born to Kill

So are we going to see an official logo featuring Tux with "Born to Kill" scratched on his helmet?

db

This is great!

Now the troops can compile Gentoo while on duty. Hopefully, it'll be finished when they get home.

Licensed to kill

I'd love to see a software license that says something to the effect of "This software will not be used to wage war or to kill any humans".

Re:

I'd love to see a software license that says something to the effect of "This software will not be used to wage war or to kill any humans".

It wouldn't be an open-source license, though. From the Open Source Definition [opensource.org]: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.

But killing puppies with linux is okay?

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 a

Re:Licensed to kill

I'd love to see a software license that says something to the effect of "This software will not be used to wage war or to kill any humans".

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.

Re:Licensed to kill

So what are you saying here? That violence was "pointless" and "ineffective" when dealing with Hitler?

Re:

The fact that violence is sometimes necessary does not mean that it is always, or even usually, a useful solution. Little kids run around hitting people they don't like. Adults understand that violence is a last resort.

Re:

You might first consider that Hitler's violence brought down violence upon himself.

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 lo

Mod parent down...

...ofcourse parent is right, but this type of argument is usually spoken when the discussion is not nearly at that level.
It quenches any discussion , because no one dares to disagree.
If parent want's to partake in a discussion, try to counter the argument

Good for them!

NOT using anything related to MS is a good thing.

"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.

Mine, personally not at all

Blame game

If anything goes wrong with the project, they could always say it's General Protection's Fault.

hey!

torrent plz

Several years of development...

Perhaps it's time for them to upgrade to Reason 2.0.

Lines of Code?

Now there's a useful metric. It says so much about quality and reliability.

FCS Should be Cancelled

The thing about FCS is that, when early versions of it have been tried in our present war, soldiers have found that the extra computerization is often not worth the weight of the computer. It seems to me that if the Army is going to be spending billions of dollars developing anything, they ought to be looking for a way to detect hidden explosives. FCS doesn't do a damn thing to aid against insurgencies whose primary weapon is the booby trap.

Re:

soldiers have found that the extra computerization is often not worth the weight of the computer.

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 b

Re:Uptime?

I'm just curious how you ran uptime with no users logged in?

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.

Re:

See www.defensetech.org, search for FCS, and prepare for a long, long read.

Insightful?

OK.

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 ...limited. I'm sure *some* things will find its way back out, but in practice, if a hack needs to be made on the code to make things work in an actual theater of operations, I wouldn't count on it appearing outside in the real world anytime soon.

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.

Re:Insightful?

>> The software in question will never see the public Internet because it's all classified Secret and above.

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.

Re:

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

Re:

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 sou