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The Complex Crux Of Wireless Warfare
By the Lines
SOURCE: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Government Accountability Office, Gary McGraw of Cigital | The Washington Post - January 24, 2008 TOOLBOX   Resize Text
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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.
Malicious Code
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.
As part of Future Combat Systems, the Army is designing a new generation of combat vehicles, equipped with sensors and rockets to intercept missiles and rocket-propelled grenades; each vehicle weighs about 30 tons, less than half that of the standard Abrams tank.
The Defense Science Board, an advisory body to the secretary of defense, raised concerns in a report last year about commercial code created by foreign programmers. "Malicious code is a key concern of the FCS program," the panel said, adding that it "lacks confidence in current tools for detecting malicious code."
Boeing's Muilenburg said, "We go through a series of tests to defend against all of those threats." That, he said, includes hacking into the network to identify vulnerabilities.
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.
Microsoft, which does substantial business with the military, declined to comment.
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. The software, in the name of speed, will find an efficient mathematical algorithm to reconnect the soldier. The design is a combination of commercial software and code written from scratch by many software developers, he said. Instead of Microsoft, Boeing said it is using software developed by a hodgepodge of companies including Red Hat and Wind River Systems. Boeing is developing the operating system with SAIC, which is also assisting Boeing on another critical piece of software for the Army program, the Warfighter Machine Interface, which is essentially what soldiers will see on their monitors.
SAIC worked on another major software development program for the U.S. government, and it didn't go well. In 2001, the FBI hired SAIC to create software to update the bureau's computer systems and later to replace its paper files. By 2004, the FBI abandoned the $170 million program, starting over. Arnold Punaro, an SAIC executive vice president, said in a statement that the company recognized problems early in the program. But it was "not forceful enough in bringing them to the attention of the FBI's most senior leaders, including the director."
An Available System
When the Army began developing Future Combat Systems, it decided to rely on Boeing and SAIC to create a new operating system rather than borrow from what it already had, Blue Force Tracking.
