Intel allowed the government to have a no-fee license to produce a radiation hardened Pentium chip. The article has some details on radiation hardening. http://www.sandia.gov/media/rhp.htm [sandia.gov]
I've built replacement keyboard assemblies for one of the systems on that. Not sure which. It was a rf and fluid gasketed oversized heavy aluminum box. The actual keyboard was made by Cherry. I was so disappointed. It's like finding a Yugo engine in a Corvette. http://www.cherrycorp.com/ [cherrycorp.com]
While the headline might be good for a light giggle, there's a good reason why it's 10 years behind. Airplane avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people die. That especially goes for a plane that uses a flying wing design (which are historically hard to stabilize without computer control), and potentially carries nuclear warheads.
No, the GP is correct. As Patton once said (paraphrasing), "the point is not for you to die for your country, but the make the other poor bastard die for his."
The quote from Patton was also in a film: Patton (1970)
"Nobody ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." -- General George S. Patton (George C. Scott)
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday July 14 2008, @04:23PM (#24187635)
More than that. Aircraft, especially military aircraft that fly at the altitudes the B2 does, also require "hardened" electronics, capable of handling much larger temperature ranges and higher electro-magnetic interference. That means the processors, while they may be Pentium class, are not Pentium's. They may even use ceramics for the ICs, but either way the new electronics would require a much larger feature size, and therefore less performance than the current cutting edge electronics.
Exactly, you beat me to the punch. The same is true in spacecraft components, which is why the computing power and other parts always seem to be so pitiful compared to current technology. (Well, plus the lag between design and actual appearance in space.) Sad, but it's most likely the best way. It's not quite as clear that the military should be quite as far behind as NASA, though.
I worked on a Navy jet upgrade about 10 years ago. It was a project to replace an antiquated (read that as "wire-wrap technology") autopilot computer with a brand-new, spiffy, fully digital autopilot computer. Of course, just like the B-2, it had to be a form/fit replacement.
I was shocked when, at the first design review, the contractor said they would be using an 80286 as the CPU. Remember, this is 1995. The 80286 was introduced in 1984. By 1995, the Pentium was the standard. So of course I asked "Why use such an older processor, when a newer one would be much much faster?"
Their answer was essentially one word.
HEAT.
The 286 had perfectly adequate processing power to run the fairly simple algorithms needed for autopilot and related functions, including all the error detection and fault logging, as well as the required 2x of government-mandated growth allowance (you MUST use less than 50% of clock times in your design). Using anything more high-powered would generate more heat (which must be dissipated somewhere in the closed environment), and use more current. On a 1960's era airplane, with Kapton wiring and its risk of insulation fires, and its limited power generation ability, you don't toss in higher heat and power requirements without VERY good reasons.
The result turned out to be perfectly adequate, and a vast improvement over the original design.
Let me toss out another interesting statistic. From what I remember from a recent brief, Boeing is right now delivering upgrades to its commercial airline fleet autopilot/navigation computers with 32Mb of data storage installed for the navigation database. Just 32Mb. That's what you're sitting behind in every Southwest or United or American flight you enjoy. With memory so cheap, why not put more in? Same logic, same ideas: for commericial and military programs, you don't overbuild a device just because you can. You'd better have a REALLY good reason to make a change.
We geeks tend to forget that overclocking and water-cooling and 8Gb RAM and 2-TB hard drives are thousands of times overkill for very many purposes.
Are you sure? Software tends to be written by developers, and its the quality of them, their ability to work to quality standards and basically take their time to get it done right that matters. All that C code you've seen crash - it'll be because someone hacked it together, no-one tested it thoroughly enough, and no-one took the time to do it right. C is even easy to code reliably if you impose some restrictions on yourself (or use some libraries/routines that you can't easily take shortcuts with - eg if you can pass a pointer to a routine, you're going to pass a bad one one day, do some wrong arithmentic on it, etc. If you pass a strict fixed-size buffer, then you're much less likely to get an error. Just a simple example).
The point is you can write bad software in any language, the new C# stuff at work crashes all over the place and is slow. The old C code from 1984 is still working fine. Its not these languages that had anything to do with their relative quality.
The only reason I brought that up is because one of my editors said, Oh look, they have Java on this thing.
Oh, Java. Well, we have Java in the ground system not onboard the spacecraft.
Right. That's what it's starting to sound like.
That's right. Yeah. The spacecraft software is entirely in C.
C? Really? That surprises me a little bit.
Yes. It's entirely in C.
I thought Lockheed Martin was a big ADA shop for this sort of thing.
ADA is used largely in military applications, but JPL at any rate has moved away from ADA. Cassini, I believe, would be the last JPL mission that used ADA. And that was largely due to the success of the Mars Pathfinder in the mid-nineties. And as I said, these missions are to a large extent all derived from Mars Pathfinder.
After that successful mission, you say, Hey, we could do it in C now. That's not as scary as everybody thought?
...From the classic B-52 onwards, they do useful things like haul large quantities of high explosives other systems cannot match. Improvements in tactical control mean the folks on the ground can call in tremendous force when needed.
As a dirt-eating infantry guy, this is a pet peeve of mine. I feel a rant coming on...
The trouble is, the contemporary battlefield doesn't need the "tremendous force" of 38 tons of bombs, from 35K feet, that'll be here in 14 hours (B-52 from Diego) or worse, 40 hours (B-2 from freakin' Missouri!). There isn't a bunch of factories with static GPS coordinates that can be preloaded by ground crews into GPS guided weapons. It's largely just guys like me, calling on a radio, asking for a couple 500 pounders on the ridgeline 3 klicks away, to get two dozen guys with RPGs and machine guns, NOW!. The B-52, B-1, and B-2 just don't fit into that equation.
Modern air-to-ground warfare doesn't need "big" strategic bombers like that. For the last 50+ years, the US Air Force has been living in a fantasy world, a sepia-toned universe where it's perpetually 1950, where bombers were the strategic "big stick" that brought down the Nazis, and were the Alpha-to-Omega of nuclear weapons delivery. The trouble is, the former is a self-delusional lie, and the latter keeled over with the ICBM and finally died with the USSR in 1990. The Air Force mythology of strategic bombing is based on the largely pointless high-altitude mass bombing of Europe in WW2. The Key West Agreement of 1948 which separated the Air Force as its own service, separate from the Army and forbidding the Army to operate aircraft, centered heavily on the "success" of the strategic bombing of Germany, particularly the crippling of the German ball bearing manufacturing. Funny thing is, decades later when Albert Speer was asked about this, his reply was (paraphrased) "They were trying to bomb our ball bearing factories? If so, we had no idea."
The practical upshot of all this is that the Air Force was founded on a fantasy which continues to hamper its effectiveness to this day. Granted, my view on the subject is heavily colored by my 16 years as a lowly grunt in the Army, hiding in holes trying to get effective close air support from those guys; but I think my view is pretty accurate. There aren't any more superpowers to mount a credible air defense, to put up a serious opposition. The one thing that we really need from the Air Force is the one thing that they've consistently tried to get out of providing: Close Air Support. Air Force brass had the unmitigated gall to try to retire the A-10 in the 90's and "replace" it with the F-16! They constantly push for more air-superiority and high altitude bombing assets when the cold hard reality is that we don't need that. Contemporary warfare is non-linear, against small bands of irregulars operating in primitive conditions. As infantrymen, what we need from the Air Force is all-weather, low-altitude, precision ordinance delivery, but we hardly ever get it!. If I had a nickel for every time I saw the Air Force drop in the wrong place, or worse, "call in sick" because of bad weather, I'd have a hell of a lot of nickels. The military has always been a hotbed of backstabbing, featherbedding, and general power politics, and the Air Force continuing live in its glory days of WW2 is a prime example (don't even get me started on the Navy, they're even worse). The Army has managed to fill some of its air needs via helicopters--- and getting the Air Force to let us have those was a fight--- but helicopters are lightweight, short range assets. We need fixed wing air support, particularly in Afghanistan where altitude and weather make helicopter operations near impossible. Personally, I think the Air Force should turn over the A-10 and AC-130 assets to the Army and let us do our own close air support, and they can go sit around in their giant strato-bombe
Your ideas are all well and good right up until war is not based on tactical ground actions any more. I am in the air force and I agree that our role is ridiculously inflated, but we do play a role. I do not see, however, what would be gained by rolling the air force into the army or vice versa. The AF has lots of ground troops and frankly I don't see them ever because I work on jets. If we were in the same branch, you wouln't ever see me because when I'm in Iraq, I spend most of my time working in the HAS's on our jets or sleeping. If the army took over our c-130 assets, they would belong to an 'army aeronautical division' or something and functionally would very closely resemble the current situation.
Unless your idea is that 11 bravos would fix, fuel, load, and direct their own aircraft. That's not much different from the air force saying that IT ought to just have a private army of its own that understood the strengths and limitations of air power, etc. We do aircraft and airfield security, you guys go outside the wire. That's just the way it is. Aircraft maintainers don't go outside the wire- it's not a place where we're useful. You could train us to be ground troops but that completely negates the advantages of division of skilled labor where you get really good at shooting people and I get really good at keeping jets from falling out of the sky.
And btw the A-10 is not retired. If you can track down a copy of the july-august Airman magazine, A-10s in afghanistan are the cover story. I personally work on f-16s and my base is one of only a few with some very advanced targetting systems and the pilot training to match. I would put our 16s against vanilla a-10s any day for recon and bomb drops. For close-in ground support the army DOES have its own aircraft, they're called ah-64 gunships and they're everywhere in iraq. Those things will end a party like no one's business and that's why YOU HAVE THEM. And so if you want to get mad that your close-in air support sucks, talk to your apache pilots.
Maybe we'll run into each other over there- I'll buy you a NA beer.
As was recently discussed about the current Mars lander mission, it's really just fine if something built to do a very specific job doesn't have support for this week's gamer-friendly video board, a hacked Wii controller, bluetooth, and a dozen USB ports. Hardened, reliable hardware and bug-free seems better than, say, some of the misadventures [www.cbc.ca] that some IT-intensive commercial aircraft have suffered over the last few years. It's OK to be one notch less cool when you're flying around with large weapons.
Having worked for a defense contractor (non-weapons, mind you) for 6 years, it doesn't surprise me at all that the technology for such things are at least 10 years behind state of the art. It takes so long to fully satisfy the requirements of a military contract, then it takes at least as long to fix all the little bugs that inevitably pop up after delivery; then there's the military amending their requirements halfway through the project, sometimes resulting in having to go almost all the way back to square one in the design cycle. Oh, and don't even get me started on requirements that belong in cartoons and comic books, not the real world of engineering.
Naturally the stealth bomber's software has to be rewritten for the new platform, in particular the operational flight program (OFP) - the app which lets the ungainly plane fly, rather than lurching out of control as it would without constant computer assistance. (A recent B-2 crash shortly after takeoff at the Pacific island of Guam was caused by a false sensor data feed into the OFP, resulting from an airspeed measuring device being affected by tropical moisture. The duff data fooled the OFP app into wrecking the $2bn bomber - while the pilots were unable to do anything to stop it.)
I'm not sure that replacing JOVIAL code with C code is actually progress. If JOVIAL is anything like ALGOL 60, it's arguably a better programming language than C.
My first job out of college was on the B-2, specifically on the flight control box. Despite what C/C++ detractors might say, JOVIAL as I saw it in use was vastly inferior to nearly any other language I've ever used. Compiler bugs were known but never fixed. The minuscule market for JOVIAL applications meant limited or no choice in compilers or tools. The lack of coders meant that you could not attract personnel and those you had were incentivized to get the heck out so as not to become unemployable.
Frankly, the actual language you use on a project is almost (not quite, but almost) an afterthought compared to the other factors of toolsets and talent pool.
What this article seems to overlook is that they DONT WANT new computers and new operating systems, new languages. They want older, stable, rpedictable, thoroughly vetted technologies.
They dont need a super computer to fly these, but what they do need os to know every quirk, every instability, and already have dealt with it so that NOTHING even remotely suprises them.
Thats why moving to C is a big step.
it may seem silly to us because we run all sorts of new stuff on our computers designed to run many things we may never use; These are VERY purpose built, need very little flexibility outside its designated purpose, and doesnt need to be overdone.
I may buy a PC system anticipating programs down the road that might be expanded, but for an aircraft, missiles, sattelites, even the space shuttle which runs EVRY old code, they just need it to do exactly what it needs too, and if that works fine with 256k, then thats what it will get, as long as its stable as all hell.
I've worked on military CPU replacement in the past for a subcontractor. We were upgrading an early 60s avionics set built from, get this, AND, OR and NOR gates. The most complex part was a 4 bit shift register - pretty wild. So I know a bit about this.
The major problem with using components newer than the mid-90s is that they are so sensitive to radiation. Not EM, but Alpha particles and other cosmic rays. Its prohibitively expensive to rad-harden (radiation harden) sub-100nm chips and when that is achieved the yields are so low that the cost balloons even more.
Radiation hits my cause the rare BSOD for you, on a nuclear armed aircraft its may show up as a MCOD - mushroom cloud of destruction.
That just means their development & testing cycle runs about 15 years. That doesn't seem terribly unreasonable given that reliability is paramount for a billion dollar piece of equipment.
I work on brand new industrial controls that are still using Z80 processors.
With one MEGABYTE of ferris-core memory. Five redundant computers.
The shuttle prgram was late getting started and they didnt want to changes the software.
"And they made fun of vacuum tube computers in MIGs."
It's "Pentium class", not "Pentium". I would bet my money on this comptuer being PowerPC based, probably PowerPC 74xx based, also known as "G4" of Macintosh fame. There are _a_lot_ of PowerPC based avionics, and cutting edge airplanes like Eurofighter, Gripen and F-22 have multiple PowerPC based systems doing all kinds of stuff. When doing embedded electronics for the military you are not going far pitching Intel stuff. You are going to use hardware from manufacturers that can guarantee parts that'll keep being manufactured over many years and are harndened to endure rapid heat, cold, moist and preassure fluctuations. Intel are doing commodity products for low end table environments. Look to manufacturers like Freescale for the stable and durable stuff.
They should have written all the flight control in Ruby & made it an AJAX web application that runs on Firefox on an iPhone. That would make it zillions of times faster than that old C code & Pentiums, right?
Those of you who have read some about Intel's coming Larrabee GPU know that it consists of many Pentium cores. The thing is, these cores aren't as old as one may think.
When the Pentium core became obsolete, Intel gave the technology to the U.S. military, which in turn developed it further and added bug fixes. So it's not really technology from the 90's only, because it has been in development for quite some time.
Additionally, old technology has the advantage of being used so much that virtually everything is known about the chip, including bugs. Therefore, it is much safer to work with such a chip rather than going for the latest Core 2 Duo.
As the article mentions, if there is a malfunction of the B2 Spirit's computer system (either in sensors or the system itself) the pilots must eject or be killed. There was a video, not available any more, explaining that the computer is the reason why the airplane doesn't spin out of control and crash. If it goes offline it takes just a few seconds before you're toast. This apparently happened once or twice during early development while they worked out the kinks in the software (sorry, can't find any current proof of this). The only B2 that has crashed (that we know of) crashed due to bad sensor input to the computer (if that is really the truth):
When you've got a billion dollars flying around at very high speeds, with some nuclear weapons on-board, and a couple of highly-trained pilots... you need to be 100% sure the system doesn't go off-line resulting in a near instant vehicle loss. It is also well known that spacecraft and aircraft use technologies that are actually very advanced, but might appear on the surface as old. The amount of materials research that goes in to these things costs in the multitudes of billions. It is very important the H-bombs drop where they are supposed to, and when. It is very scary, and the only way to test all the moving parts together is to start a nuclear war. As the SysAdmins say: "Not if, but when."
The military isn't "behind" in development - the rest of us are behind in testing and quality.
Yeah, you laugh that they use CPUs an order of magnitude slower than your notebook. But they can't afford a BSOD, a floating-point error or any of the other nonsense that you put up with every day. Their processors might be slower, but I wouldn't bet that - taking all things into account - their total productivity is.
Software quality on the "bleeding edge", where most of us live, is abysmal, and that's putting it very nicely. Regular users are beta-testers, and that's if they're lucky. There is software being sold today that shouldn't qualify as an alpha version. When's the last time you bought a game, just for an extreme example, that did not already have a patch available before the box was on sale the first day?
That's nonsense you can't afford in a billion-dollar plane with nuclear weapons on board.
"The Stealth Bomber's mission is to deliver nuke bombs inside Soviet territory. It's not really that good at anything else. Though it does get used for other missions, since the US needs to justify spending $2.2 BILLION on each one."
It's quite good at dropping large bombloads on places, other than Soviet Union, that are defended by SAMs and radar-guided AAA, and avoid getting shot down.
No other aircraft in the world can do this. F-117 can do the "avoid getting shot down" part, but not the large bombload part.
I hate to break it to anybody (Score:5, Insightful)
but microprocessors that are designed to handle a nuclear EMP aren't blazing fast. But they are definitely not 90s technology.
I think the B-2 bomber will be fine unless its pilots require the extra computing power to play "punch the monkey" or the South Park Lemmiwinks game.
Re:I hate to break it to anybody (Score:5, Funny)
>South Park Lemmiwinks game.
The B-2 is operated by the Air Force. Surely you must have been thinking of the Navy when you wrote that comment.
Parent
Re:I hate to break it to anybody (Score:5, Funny)
They were playing "Global Thermonuclear War" back in the early 80's on much less than Pentiums...
Parent
Re:I hate to break it to anybody (Score:4, Informative)
Intel allowed the government to have a no-fee license to produce a radiation hardened Pentium chip. The article has some details on radiation hardening.
http://www.sandia.gov/media/rhp.htm [sandia.gov]
I've built replacement keyboard assemblies for one of the systems on that. Not sure which. It was a rf and fluid gasketed oversized heavy aluminum box. The actual keyboard was made by Cherry. I was so disappointed. It's like finding a Yugo engine in a Corvette. http://www.cherrycorp.com/ [cherrycorp.com]
Parent
Bitchin' (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bitchin' (Score:5, Funny)
More likely "It is pitch black, which is correct for a Stealth Bomber.".
Parent
Re:Bitchin' (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, even more likely:
It is pitch black. You are the grue.
Parent
Don't you mean? (Score:5, Funny)
89.999997612?
Re:Don't you mean? (Score:5, Funny)
I am Pentium of Borg. Division is futile! You will be approximated.
Parent
Re:Don't you mean? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug [wikipedia.org]
Parent
There's a Reason for That (Score:5, Informative)
While the headline might be good for a light giggle, there's a good reason why it's 10 years behind. Airplane avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people die. That especially goes for a plane that uses a flying wing design (which are historically hard to stabilize without computer control), and potentially carries nuclear warheads.
Re:There's a Reason for That (Score:5, Insightful)
avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people don't die.
Parent
Re:There's a Reason for That (Score:5, Insightful)
... or the wrong people die.
Parent
Re:There's a Reason for That (Score:5, Informative)
No, the GP is correct. As Patton once said (paraphrasing), "the point is not for you to die for your country, but the make the other poor bastard die for his."
Parent
Re:It was Douglas MacArthur (Score:4, Informative)
The quote from Patton was also in a film: Patton (1970)
"Nobody ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." -- General George S. Patton (George C. Scott)
Parent
Re:There's a Reason for That (Score:4, Funny)
"Ultimate reliability" and "Pentium class from the 90s" just doesn't really go well together.
Parent
Re:There's a Reason for That (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:There's a Reason for That (Score:5, Informative)
More than that. Aircraft, especially military aircraft that fly at the altitudes the B2 does, also require "hardened" electronics, capable of handling much larger temperature ranges and higher electro-magnetic interference. That means the processors, while they may be Pentium class, are not Pentium's. They may even use ceramics for the ICs, but either way the new electronics would require a much larger feature size, and therefore less performance than the current cutting edge electronics.
Parent
Re:There's a Reason for That (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly, you beat me to the punch. The same is true in spacecraft components, which is why the computing power and other parts always seem to be so pitiful compared to current technology. (Well, plus the lag between design and actual appearance in space.) Sad, but it's most likely the best way. It's not quite as clear that the military should be quite as far behind as NASA, though.
Parent
Re:There's a (BETTER) Reason for That (Score:4, Informative)
I worked on a Navy jet upgrade about 10 years ago. It was a project to replace an antiquated (read that as "wire-wrap technology") autopilot computer with a brand-new, spiffy, fully digital autopilot computer. Of course, just like the B-2, it had to be a form/fit replacement.
I was shocked when, at the first design review, the contractor said they would be using an 80286 as the CPU. Remember, this is 1995. The 80286 was introduced in 1984. By 1995, the Pentium was the standard. So of course I asked "Why use such an older processor, when a newer one would be much much faster?"
Their answer was essentially one word.
HEAT.
The 286 had perfectly adequate processing power to run the fairly simple algorithms needed for autopilot and related functions, including all the error detection and fault logging, as well as the required 2x of government-mandated growth allowance (you MUST use less than 50% of clock times in your design). Using anything more high-powered would generate more heat (which must be dissipated somewhere in the closed environment), and use more current. On a 1960's era airplane, with Kapton wiring and its risk of insulation fires, and its limited power generation ability, you don't toss in higher heat and power requirements without VERY good reasons.
The result turned out to be perfectly adequate, and a vast improvement over the original design.
Let me toss out another interesting statistic. From what I remember from a recent brief, Boeing is right now delivering upgrades to its commercial airline fleet autopilot/navigation computers with 32Mb of data storage installed for the navigation database. Just 32Mb. That's what you're sitting behind in every Southwest or United or American flight you enjoy. With memory so cheap, why not put more in? Same logic, same ideas: for commericial and military programs, you don't overbuild a device just because you can. You'd better have a REALLY good reason to make a change.
We geeks tend to forget that overclocking and water-cooling and 8Gb RAM and 2-TB hard drives are thousands of times overkill for very many purposes.
Parent
Re:There's a Reason for That (Score:4, Informative)
The version I heard was that there was water in a sensor that fooled the avionics computer.
Where I got the info
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/06/video-stealth-b.html [wired.com]
Parent
Re:Free of BUGS? (Score:5, Informative)
Are you sure? Software tends to be written by developers, and its the quality of them, their ability to work to quality standards and basically take their time to get it done right that matters. All that C code you've seen crash - it'll be because someone hacked it together, no-one tested it thoroughly enough, and no-one took the time to do it right. C is even easy to code reliably if you impose some restrictions on yourself (or use some libraries/routines that you can't easily take shortcuts with - eg if you can pass a pointer to a routine, you're going to pass a bad one one day, do some wrong arithmentic on it, etc. If you pass a strict fixed-size buffer, then you're much less likely to get an error. Just a simple example).
The point is you can write bad software in any language, the new C# stuff at work crashes all over the place and is slow. The old C code from 1984 is still working fine. Its not these languages that had anything to do with their relative quality.
eg. Spacecraft are written in C [oreilly.com], and they've worked better than anyone expected:
The only reason I brought that up is because one of my editors said, Oh look, they have Java on this thing.
Oh, Java. Well, we have Java in the ground system not onboard the spacecraft.
Right. That's what it's starting to sound like.
That's right. Yeah. The spacecraft software is entirely in C.
C? Really? That surprises me a little bit.
Yes. It's entirely in C.
I thought Lockheed Martin was a big ADA shop for this sort of thing.
ADA is used largely in military applications, but JPL at any rate has moved away from ADA. Cassini, I believe, would be the last JPL mission that used ADA. And that was largely due to the success of the Mars Pathfinder in the mid-nineties. And as I said, these missions are to a large extent all derived from Mars Pathfinder.
After that successful mission, you say, Hey, we could do it in C now. That's not as scary as everybody thought?
Yeah. Right.
Parent
Re:There's a Reason for That (Score:5, Interesting)
...From the classic B-52 onwards, they do useful things like haul large quantities of high explosives other systems cannot match. Improvements in tactical control mean the folks on the ground can call in tremendous force when needed.
As a dirt-eating infantry guy, this is a pet peeve of mine. I feel a rant coming on...
The trouble is, the contemporary battlefield doesn't need the "tremendous force" of 38 tons of bombs, from 35K feet, that'll be here in 14 hours (B-52 from Diego) or worse, 40 hours (B-2 from freakin' Missouri!). There isn't a bunch of factories with static GPS coordinates that can be preloaded by ground crews into GPS guided weapons. It's largely just guys like me, calling on a radio, asking for a couple 500 pounders on the ridgeline 3 klicks away, to get two dozen guys with RPGs and machine guns, NOW!. The B-52, B-1, and B-2 just don't fit into that equation.
Modern air-to-ground warfare doesn't need "big" strategic bombers like that. For the last 50+ years, the US Air Force has been living in a fantasy world, a sepia-toned universe where it's perpetually 1950, where bombers were the strategic "big stick" that brought down the Nazis, and were the Alpha-to-Omega of nuclear weapons delivery. The trouble is, the former is a self-delusional lie, and the latter keeled over with the ICBM and finally died with the USSR in 1990. The Air Force mythology of strategic bombing is based on the largely pointless high-altitude mass bombing of Europe in WW2. The Key West Agreement of 1948 which separated the Air Force as its own service, separate from the Army and forbidding the Army to operate aircraft, centered heavily on the "success" of the strategic bombing of Germany, particularly the crippling of the German ball bearing manufacturing. Funny thing is, decades later when Albert Speer was asked about this, his reply was (paraphrased) "They were trying to bomb our ball bearing factories? If so, we had no idea."
The practical upshot of all this is that the Air Force was founded on a fantasy which continues to hamper its effectiveness to this day. Granted, my view on the subject is heavily colored by my 16 years as a lowly grunt in the Army, hiding in holes trying to get effective close air support from those guys; but I think my view is pretty accurate. There aren't any more superpowers to mount a credible air defense, to put up a serious opposition. The one thing that we really need from the Air Force is the one thing that they've consistently tried to get out of providing: Close Air Support. Air Force brass had the unmitigated gall to try to retire the A-10 in the 90's and "replace" it with the F-16! They constantly push for more air-superiority and high altitude bombing assets when the cold hard reality is that we don't need that. Contemporary warfare is non-linear, against small bands of irregulars operating in primitive conditions. As infantrymen, what we need from the Air Force is all-weather, low-altitude, precision ordinance delivery, but we hardly ever get it!. If I had a nickel for every time I saw the Air Force drop in the wrong place, or worse, "call in sick" because of bad weather, I'd have a hell of a lot of nickels. The military has always been a hotbed of backstabbing, featherbedding, and general power politics, and the Air Force continuing live in its glory days of WW2 is a prime example (don't even get me started on the Navy, they're even worse). The Army has managed to fill some of its air needs via helicopters--- and getting the Air Force to let us have those was a fight--- but helicopters are lightweight, short range assets. We need fixed wing air support, particularly in Afghanistan where altitude and weather make helicopter operations near impossible. Personally, I think the Air Force should turn over the A-10 and AC-130 assets to the Army and let us do our own close air support, and they can go sit around in their giant strato-bombe
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Re:There's a Reason for That (Score:5, Informative)
Your ideas are all well and good right up until war is not based on tactical ground actions any more. I am in the air force and I agree that our role is ridiculously inflated, but we do play a role. I do not see, however, what would be gained by rolling the air force into the army or vice versa. The AF has lots of ground troops and frankly I don't see them ever because I work on jets. If we were in the same branch, you wouln't ever see me because when I'm in Iraq, I spend most of my time working in the HAS's on our jets or sleeping. If the army took over our c-130 assets, they would belong to an 'army aeronautical division' or something and functionally would very closely resemble the current situation.
Unless your idea is that 11 bravos would fix, fuel, load, and direct their own aircraft. That's not much different from the air force saying that IT ought to just have a private army of its own that understood the strengths and limitations of air power, etc. We do aircraft and airfield security, you guys go outside the wire. That's just the way it is. Aircraft maintainers don't go outside the wire- it's not a place where we're useful. You could train us to be ground troops but that completely negates the advantages of division of skilled labor where you get really good at shooting people and I get really good at keeping jets from falling out of the sky.
And btw the A-10 is not retired. If you can track down a copy of the july-august Airman magazine, A-10s in afghanistan are the cover story. I personally work on f-16s and my base is one of only a few with some very advanced targetting systems and the pilot training to match. I would put our 16s against vanilla a-10s any day for recon and bomb drops. For close-in ground support the army DOES have its own aircraft, they're called ah-64 gunships and they're everywhere in iraq. Those things will end a party like no one's business and that's why YOU HAVE THEM. And so if you want to get mad that your close-in air support sucks, talk to your apache pilots.
Maybe we'll run into each other over there- I'll buy you a NA beer.
-b
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Better functionally quaint than gee-whiz and oops (Score:5, Insightful)
Regarding that Mars lander... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Regarding that Mars lander... (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, its on Mars. Everythings infrared.
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Not surprised, even if I am amused (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not surprised, even if I am amused (Score:5, Funny)
Yea, at least dealing with the private sector and private contracts you don't have to worry about any of those issues.
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Security by oldness (Score:4, Insightful)
Favourite quote from El 'Reg: (Score:5, Interesting)
Naturally the stealth bomber's software has to be rewritten for the new platform, in particular the operational flight program (OFP) - the app which lets the ungainly plane fly, rather than lurching out of control as it would without constant computer assistance. (A recent B-2 crash shortly after takeoff at the Pacific island of Guam was caused by a false sensor data feed into the OFP, resulting from an airspeed measuring device being affected by tropical moisture. The duff data fooled the OFP app into wrecking the $2bn bomber - while the pilots were unable to do anything to stop it.)
Brilliant!
element of surprise (Score:4, Informative)
imagine that in the future the enemy (whoever thinks they are the enemy and the others, who are not even aware that they maybe the enemy) will never know when they will get their shit kicked out of them due to a possible Pentium FDIV error [wikipedia.org] or a buffer overflow of some sort. [wikipedia.org] Let's just hope that any security bugs will be dealt with promptly, cause if they can hack into a computer because of some CPU errors by using java or javascript through a browser [slashdot.org], the will certainly be looking for a way to control some [wikipedia.org] more [wikipedia.org] exciting [wikipedia.org] equipment [wikipedia.org].
Re:element of surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
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maybe they should have stayed in the '60s (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure that replacing JOVIAL code with C code is actually progress. If JOVIAL is anything like ALGOL 60, it's arguably a better programming language than C.
Re:maybe they should have stayed in the '60s (Score:5, Funny)
If JOVIAL is anything like ALGOL 60, it's arguably a better programming language than C.
It's HAPPIER.
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JOVIAL BITES (Score:4, Interesting)
Frankly, the actual language you use on a project is almost (not quite, but almost) an afterthought compared to the other factors of toolsets and talent pool.
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90's IS cutting edge for that stuff. (Score:5, Insightful)
What this article seems to overlook is that they DONT WANT new computers and new operating systems, new languages. They want older, stable, rpedictable, thoroughly vetted technologies.
They dont need a super computer to fly these, but what they do need os to know every quirk, every instability, and already have dealt with it so that NOTHING even remotely suprises them.
Thats why moving to C is a big step.
it may seem silly to us because we run all sorts of new stuff on our computers designed to run many things we may never use; These are VERY purpose built, need very little flexibility outside its designated purpose, and doesnt need to be overdone.
I may buy a PC system anticipating programs down the road that might be expanded, but for an aircraft, missiles, sattelites, even the space shuttle which runs EVRY old code, they just need it to do exactly what it needs too, and if that works fine with 256k, then thats what it will get, as long as its stable as all hell.
Re:90's IS cutting edge for that stuff. (Score:5, Interesting)
The major problem with using components newer than the mid-90s is that they are so sensitive to radiation. Not EM, but Alpha particles and other cosmic rays. Its prohibitively expensive to rad-harden (radiation harden) sub-100nm chips and when that is achieved the yields are so low that the cost balloons even more. Radiation hits my cause the rare BSOD for you, on a nuclear armed aircraft its may show up as a MCOD - mushroom cloud of destruction.
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So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
That just means their development & testing cycle runs about 15 years. That doesn't seem terribly unreasonable given that reliability is paramount for a billion dollar piece of equipment.
I work on brand new industrial controls that are still using Z80 processors.
Pentiums are well suited to a stealth craft (Score:4, Funny)
Pentium 4 chips and Athlons just get shot out of the sky by heat seeking missiles.
space shuttle runs on 1970s computers (Score:4, Insightful)
"And they made fun of vacuum tube computers in MIGs."
Probably not x86 (Score:5, Informative)
It's "Pentium class", not "Pentium". I would bet my money on this comptuer being PowerPC based, probably PowerPC 74xx based, also known as "G4" of Macintosh fame. There are _a_lot_ of PowerPC based avionics, and cutting edge airplanes like Eurofighter, Gripen and F-22 have multiple PowerPC based systems doing all kinds of stuff. When doing embedded electronics for the military you are not going far pitching Intel stuff. You are going to use hardware from manufacturers that can guarantee parts that'll keep being manufactured over many years and are harndened to endure rapid heat, cold, moist and preassure fluctuations. Intel are doing commodity products for low end table environments. Look to manufacturers like Freescale for the stable and durable stuff.
Exactly right. It's obsolete (Score:5, Funny)
They should have written all the flight control in Ruby & made it an AJAX web application that runs on Firefox on an iPhone. That would make it zillions of times faster than that old C code & Pentiums, right?
Re:Exactly right. It's obsolete (Score:4, Funny)
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It's not really from the 90's (Score:4, Insightful)
When the Pentium core became obsolete, Intel gave the technology to the U.S. military, which in turn developed it further and added bug fixes. So it's not really technology from the 90's only, because it has been in development for quite some time.
Additionally, old technology has the advantage of being used so much that virtually everything is known about the chip, including bugs. Therefore, it is much safer to work with such a chip rather than going for the latest Core 2 Duo.
well it's not as if they want Vista on it (Score:5, Funny)
Ultimate Ctrl+Alt+Del - The Ejection Seat (Score:4, Interesting)
As the article mentions, if there is a malfunction of the B2 Spirit's computer system (either in sensors or the system itself) the pilots must eject or be killed. There was a video, not available any more, explaining that the computer is the reason why the airplane doesn't spin out of control and crash. If it goes offline it takes just a few seconds before you're toast. This apparently happened once or twice during early development while they worked out the kinks in the software (sorry, can't find any current proof of this). The only B2 that has crashed (that we know of) crashed due to bad sensor input to the computer (if that is really the truth):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-2_Spirit#Incidents_and_accidents [wikipedia.org]
When you've got a billion dollars flying around at very high speeds, with some nuclear weapons on-board, and a couple of highly-trained pilots... you need to be 100% sure the system doesn't go off-line resulting in a near instant vehicle loss. It is also well known that spacecraft and aircraft use technologies that are actually very advanced, but might appear on the surface as old. The amount of materials research that goes in to these things costs in the multitudes of billions. It is very important the H-bombs drop where they are supposed to, and when. It is very scary, and the only way to test all the moving parts together is to start a nuclear war. As the SysAdmins say: "Not if, but when."
Here are some more details (may be a bit redundant):
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Preliminary_Design_Review_Of_New_B_2_Bomber_Computer_Architecture_Completed_999.html [spacewar.com]
The laugh's on you (Score:4, Insightful)
The military isn't "behind" in development - the rest of us are behind in testing and quality.
Yeah, you laugh that they use CPUs an order of magnitude slower than your notebook. But they can't afford a BSOD, a floating-point error or any of the other nonsense that you put up with every day. Their processors might be slower, but I wouldn't bet that - taking all things into account - their total productivity is.
Software quality on the "bleeding edge", where most of us live, is abysmal, and that's putting it very nicely. Regular users are beta-testers, and that's if they're lucky. There is software being sold today that shouldn't qualify as an alpha version. When's the last time you bought a game, just for an extreme example, that did not already have a patch available before the box was on sale the first day?
That's nonsense you can't afford in a billion-dollar plane with nuclear weapons on board.
Re:cue the fpu jokes (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone have an over/under on how many Pentium FPU jokes there will be?
Exactly 24.9999998999997...
:-P
Sorry, but you walked into that one
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Re:Still Stuck in the 1980s (Score:4, Informative)
It's quite good at dropping large bombloads on places, other than Soviet Union, that are defended by SAMs and radar-guided AAA, and avoid getting shot down.
No other aircraft in the world can do this. F-117 can do the "avoid getting shot down" part, but not the large bombload part.
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