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Nuclear-Missile1

One of the arguments the The states military frequently makes for its huge investments in cutting-border engineering is that enormous levels of spending are needed to ensure America doesn't lose ground in the perpetual technology arms race with other countries. From missile defence shields to the F-35, the United states military spends huge amounts of coin on expensive military machine hardware. As a contempo study from the Full general Accountability Office (GAO) makes clear, even so, much of the high-tech armed forces equipment in the field today is backed up past some extremely blowsy hardware.

The report notes that the Strategic Automated Command and Control System, (SACCS) is responsible for coordinating "the operational functions of the U.s.a.' nuclear forces, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers, and tanker support craft." According to the study "It runs on an IBM Series/1 Reckoner — a 1970s computing system — and uses viii-inch floppy disks."

IBM-Series1

The IBM Series/ane Archival prototype by IBM.

That sounds pretty terrible, and it'southward certainly the claim repeated in headlines across the Internet today. And there'south definitely truth to information technology — reports from back in 2022 highlighted that the Air Force was nonetheless using 8-inch floppies and 70s-era technology to run its nuclear silos. There are, still, some inconsistencies in the GAO report and some advantages to using such ancient technology.

First, let's talk about the report itself. While nosotros're non contesting the quality or nature of the work done past the GAO, at that place are some questionable statements in the documents that aren't well-explained. The table below is a list of the oldest systems still in deployment within the United states of america government. Compare the descriptions of the systems we've boxed in red with the agency-reported ages.

GAO-Report

We feel safety in guaranteeing that no computers built 52-46 years ago are running Windows Server 2008, executing Java code, or using Microsoft .Cyberspace. What's existence somewhat ignored in the printing is that this is a listing of the oldest systems however running, not the average age of computer hardware used in the government.

"Fair enough," yous might say, "But l+ years is even so actually frickin' sometime. Why would anyone still want to utilize equipment that ancient?"

The security of obsolescence

It turns out, there are some meaning advantages to having computers nearly sometime enough to qualify for social security. Take those 1970s IBM Series/i with the viii-inch floppy disks. Let's say you wanted to penetrate i of those computers. How would you practise it? At that place'due south no modern network to hack and no USB drives to serve as an infection vector. You can't load a boot sector virus or firmware trojan: These systems lack difficult drives, and they probably don't have updatable firmware. You won't exist transferring data via the figurer speaker or microphone, the Series/1 computer IBM built dorsum in 1976 has neither. There's no GPU to exploit either — systems dorsum in this era rarely had framebuffers, much less graphics cards capable of whatever kind of contained execution.

BattleStar

This strategy worked pretty well for Adama

The downside to this kind of security, as the GAO points out, is that the cost of maintaining these legacy systems gets higher every twelvemonth, and the mismatch between their capabilities and what might be required in case of an assail grows larger. Moving to mod computing hardware has significant advantages, including better UI options, faster organization updates, and the ability to process orders of magnitude more information per second. But this boosted performance has to be counterbalanced against other increased risks and the need to ensure that system migration can be performed flawlessly. Supposedly the Air Forcefulness will migrate to new systems by the end of 2022, and retire its old 1970s hardware for good.

Of class, that's just 1 system, and the regime apparently has far more than 1 obsolete rig that needs to be replaced. But relying on 1970s-era equipment isn't quite as crazy as it might seem at first glance.