Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones
December 17, 2009 - The Wall Street Journal
"U.S. adversaries continue to find simple ways to counteract sophisticated military technologies ... The difficulty, officials said, is that adding encryption to a network that is more than a decade old inolves more than placing a new piece of equipment on individual drones. ... Some of its communications technology is proprietary, so widely used encryption systems aren't readily compatible, said people familiar with the matter."
The Military-Consumer Complex
December 10, 2009 - The Economist
"Military technology used to filter down to consumers. Now it's going the other way. ... Electronics firms also move much faster than the slow, multi-year grind of military procurement programmes, with few products remaining on the market for more than a year before being replaced by something better or cheaper. And the emergence of open standards and open-source software makes it easier to repurpose off-the-shelf technologies or combine them in novel ways."
War Games
December 10, 2009 - The Economist
"Consumer products and video-gaming technology are boosting the performance and reducing the price of military equipment. ... [T]he desire to play games is not the reason why the United States Air Force recently issued a procurement request for 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) video-game consoles. It intends to link them up to build a supercomputer that will run Linux, a free, open-source operating system."
DOD Launches New Development Environment for Dependable Software
December 2009
Forg.mil "is a collaborative environment to accelerate the development and deployment of dependable software and services within the Department of Defense."
On Failure
May - June 2009 - Defense AT&L Magazine (p. 24)
"While nobody can avoid failure entirely, it is possible to influence the direction in which we fail. Failures may never be 'good,' but some failures are better than others."
