The Pentagon Should Learn From Netflix and Amazon
A new report says military software is brittle.
In March, Bloomberg News reported on a frightening study of flaws in diagnostic software for the most expensive U.S. weapon system, Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter jet. The software, called the Autonomic Logistics Information System, is supposed to govern flight scheduling, maintenance, combat mission planning, and threat analysis. But despite years of tinkering, it’s still not working as designed. According to the Government Accountability Office report obtained by Bloomberg News, maintenance crews “estimated they spend an average of 5,000 to 10,000 hours per year manually tracking information that should be automatically and accurately captured” by the software. The GAO said the software sometimes results in alerts that “an aircraft should not be flown even though it is ready for flight.”
That’s just one of the software snafus featured in a report released on Dec. 14 by the Atlantic Council called How Do You Fix a Flying Computer? Seeking Resilience in Software-Intensive Mission Systems. Its seven authors are from the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank; Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory; and Boston Cybernetics Institute, a cybersecurity training company.