Code that kills, for real

Future military combat systems will require ever more complicated code, but writing software that is bug free and ready for a firefight is a challenge that gets tougher every day.

By Scott Rosenberg

May 11, 2004 | "When everyone decides for themselves what frequency to use, what protocols to use, what standards to use, then you get systems that don't talk to each other. And it's killing us."

That sort of lament is a staple at technology conferences, and its dire language is usually a matter of executive hyperbole: Somewhere in corporate America, perhaps, a bottom line is breathing its last, and we're supposed to care.

But when the speaker is in uniform, and the incompatible systems he's describing belong to the armed forces, then you sit up straight in your seat and realize that the words are meant all too literally. As Adm. Michael Sharp of the U.S. Navy went on to say, in a talk last month in Salt Lake City, "Software errors, timing errors, can get real critical -- killing the wrong people, or not killing the right people and leaving our people unprotected."

Here's David Cook, senior research scientist at Aegis Technologies: "It has been said that, without software, the F-16C is nothing more than a $15 million lawn dart. There are stories that I know for a fact of airplanes that have been flying cross-country that land at a base that's not where they're supposed to land, and while they're there, somebody modifies the software. And the airplane flat stops in midair when they turn on the radar unit. Why? Because there are incompatible versions of this certain piece of radar software, one of which they never thought would be on that particular model."

The U.S. military is like every other institution in our society: It runs on software. And all software has bugs. But unlike, say, your Windows PC, where a crash could cause you to curse at some lost work, or your bank's ATM, where a software error could leave you with an incorrect cash balance, or even your precinct's voting machine, where a security hole could cast doubt on a close election's outcome, bugs in Pentagon programs carry potentially fatal risks. Americans in wartimes past were warned that "loose lips sink ships"; today, it's loose code that sinks ships, and downs airplanes, and costs lives.

I recently spent four days at the Systems and Software Technology Conference, a 16-year-old Pentagon-sponsored event for Defense Department contractors and software developers, because I wanted to know more about how the defense establishment approaches the ever more complex job of writing the literally hundreds of thousands of individual programs that our tax dollars fund and our armed forces depend on. Private-sector software is notoriously late, expensive and full of flaws; no one has a more urgent incentive to solve those problems than the people who write code for "the warfighter" (a Pentagon terminology upgrade for "soldier"). Have they figured out anything the rest of us can learn from?

The headlines from Iraq and the Pentagon since then may make that question seem trivial. During the week I spent at the Utah conference, casualties mounted in Iraq, and the latest defense-contracting scandal at Boeing was hitting the front pages. But the world of "defense systems" moves at a pace that is, in contrast to the flow of news, geological: The average "acquisition cycle" for a military product, according to conference speakers, is 10 years -- and that's an optimistic figure. Between the time the Pentagon commissions a system and a contractor delivers it, whole generations of private-sector computing software and hardware have come and gone.

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