EXCLUSIVE: Pentagon not prepared for software updates at the speed of war, report finds
From the F-35 to night-vision goggles, how military hardware performs in combat is increasingly driven by its software. But Pentagon procurement is too slow to keep code up to date, according to a forthcoming report from the Hudson Institute.
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
on December 14, 2022 at 11:26 AM
WASHINGTON — Without working software, the F-35 stealth fighter is a trillion-dollar lawn ornament.
Called “a computer that happens to fly” by one former Air Force chief, with algorithms running everything from basic flight controls to long-range targeting, the F-35 runs off eight million lines of code. That’s actually less than a late-model luxury car like the 2020 Mercedes S-Class, which has over 30 million lines, notes a forthcoming report from a national security thinktank, the Hudson Institute.
Yet, co-authors Jason Weiss and Dan Patt told Breaking Defense that even as private-sector software surges ahead, a Pentagon bureaucracy built to handle industrial-age hardware still struggles to get all the fighter’s code to work.
And that’s in peacetime. What if war broke out tomorrow — say a desperate Vladimir Putin lashes out at NATO, or Xi Jinping decides to seize Taiwan — and the stress of combat reveals some unexpected glitch? Imagine, for instance, that enemy anti-aircraft radars reveal a new wartime-only mode that doesn’t register in the F-35’s threat-detection algorithms. In that nightmare scenario, every day without a software update means people die.
https://breakingdefense.com/2022/12/exclusive-pentagon-not-prepared-for-software-updates-at-the-speed-of-war-report-finds/
