U.S. Army's Future Combat System Will Run Linux

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.)"

They'd better

[arvindn]

"FCS is envisioned as a networked 'system of systems".

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.

Re:Know thy enemy?

[einhverfr]

Does the military have to release their code because they are running on a GPL platform?


They would have to provide access to the code to people they distribute binaries to. Of course that is probably not the general public.

Re:Say bye-bye with EMP

[superdan2k]

You do understand that military hardware is hardened against EMPs, right? You also do understand that while soldiers will be equipped with high-tech combat gear, they'll still be trained to use the basics?

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...

Correct shielding.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are ways of radiation hardening just about any piece of electronics. Military aircraft have had such shielding since the 50's after the EMP effects were well known (to the military at least). After all, it's no fun if a plane is zapped and falls out of the sky because of the bomb it just dropped.

The goal should only be to *survive* the pulse, I assume it's acceptable for a system to, for example, be forced to reset if an EMP was encountered.

The principals are very simple - put a Faraday cage around anything you don't want to fail. This can be tricky with a complex piece of equipment where size and weight is a premium. But I've seen aircraft books with pictures of (for example) an EMP-hardened radar bay of a fighter plane - lots of very thick grounded cable running into solid metal boxes.

FYI, some off-the-shelf hardware is available in radiation-hardened versions. For example, I believe that Motorola has a line of radiation-hardened processors designed for satellites. You'd still want to use it inside some heavy shielding, but this would be more resistant to external magnetic fields and radiation than a standard CPU.

Re:Conribute back?

[chrisesposito]

In some cases, yes. I'm one of the Boeing SW developers on FCS, working on a decentralized peer-to-peer survivable infomation management prototype using JXTA from Sun. My group is funding some significant QOS (Quality of service) and security enhancements to JXTA, and the QOS work is, I'm pretty sure, being contributed to the JXTA community.

Re:Know thy enemy?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the alt.usage-english.org [alt-usage-english.org] FAQ:

This expression meaning "to contribute one's opinion" dates from the late nineteenth century. Bo Bradham suggested that it came from "the days of $.02 postage. To 'put one's two cents' worth in' referred to the cost of a letter to the editor, the president, or whomever was deserving". According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the first-class postal rate was 2 cents an ounce between 1883 and 1932 (with the exception of a brief period during World War I). This OED citation confirms that two-cent stamps were once common: "1902 ELIZ. L. BANKS Newspaper Girl xiv, Dinah got a letter through the American mail. She had fivepence to pay on it, because only a common two-cent stamp had been stuck on it." On the other hand, "two-cent" was an American expression for "of little value" (similar to British "twopenny-halfpenny"), so the phrase may simply have indicated the writer's modesty about the value of his contribution.

Re:money saving technique

[jonathanbearak]

"26 billion goes a long, long, way in the 3rd world"

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

[FFFish]

There are about four billion third-world/impoverished people in the world. The $26 billion would give them about $6.50 each. Many of these people survive on less than a dollar a day: six dollars, then, represents enough money for a week's food and health care.

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:Bittersweet news

[iCEBaLM]

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.

Quoth the GPL section 3b (emphasis mine):

Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange

If Boeing distributes GPL'd code to the US Army it also must give any third party the source if they ask for it.

-- iCEBaLM

Other services take notice! Here is one

[bstadil]

Here is one Service that took notice.

Even headline is Best battle ground for Linux [osopinion.com].

Re:Bittersweet news

[Error27]

Actually, that is not correct. They have a choice between 3a, or 3b. Boing is comercial so they cannot use 3c.

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

Re: money saving technique

[wrt2]

I decided to quote an actual Marine:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

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.

Eugenics are you on crack?

[budgenator]

That's not eugenics its triage, its what happens because medical resources are limited and must be spent where most effective. Go to the Hospital with a broken finger, and a car accident comes in at the same time you wait. Time/personnel resourse. get it.

Guess you should watch M*A*S*H, preferably the movie, not the liberal leaning sanitized comedy tv series then you know what triage is.

Re:$28B over 7 Years?

[ZPO]

1 - I wholeheartedly agree with you. I work with FCS at work and if enough folks can keep from tweaking it to uselessness we might just have a decently working system.

I think most of the posters here just don't quite get it. FCS is part of the transformation process that DOD is currently going through. The reality is that the current force structure is not well suited for what are likely to be the primary threats of the first half of the 21st century.

Throw in sub-national groups (terrorists) and you have an even larger gap in the current force structure.