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The words “soldier” and “airman” do not immediately evoke the image of workers in grease-stained coveralls turning wrenches on tanks, personnel carriers, trucks, and aircraft. Most people predictably imagine an infantryman or pilot, even though the U.S. military’s “tooth-to-tail” ratio — the number of direct combat forces compared to support personnel — is around 1:5. Despite this common misconception, it’s easy to understand why vehicle and aircraft mechanics are critical members of the military team. These support roles and countless others enable our military to be constantly ready to “fight tonight.”
Militaries have always relied on technical experts to maintain their technological dominance. Blacksmiths supported sword-wielding warriors and industrial mechanics have been critical assets since self-propelled weapons and vehicles entered use in warfare. With each technological improvement, modern militaries have become more reliant on the support personnel who ensure that these advantages are ready for war.
For every innovation, militaries have required trained experts to maintain and repair it. The Navy runs its own nuclear power school to train sailors who will maintain the reactors on ships and submarines. All four services have cyber forces to protect (or attack) military networks and public infrastructure. Yet the military’s increasing reliance on digital technology over the last 40 years has not resulted in a corresponding growth in software experts.
To be clear, cyber warriors are not software developers. A common misperception is that cyber refers to anything involving computers. Cyber teams design weapons, not user interfaces and reports. They write code, but not in MySQL, Python, or Ruby. They are not creating new tools and systems to improve efficiency within their services. The services have created no occupational specialties for software coders or even skill identifiers for qualified personnel. To remain a dominant force in the Information Age, the U.S. military — all four services — must create a corps of software developers in uniform.
The Source of the Problem
The Defense Department’s failure to keep pace with the world around it is startling. Each military service is the size of a Fortune 100 company, but collectively they have zero software developers — an impossibility in the private sector. How could this happen? The problem stems from software procurement. Procurement uses a one-size-fits-all approach, even though hardware and software are fundamentally different. Unlike hardware, software’s intellectual property is all in the code. After an initial contract-based project was completed, software contractors may have recognized the long-term benefit of being retained to maintain and fix systems. However, the contracting officers may have viewed the work as finished and been less keen to keep the contractors on. Even more likely is that contracting officers may not have recognized the importance of the source code and may never have asked the contractors to hand it over – meaning access to the code ended after the project was completed.
As annual funding has ebbed and flowed, long-term maintenance contracts have been cancelled or left to expire. If the service wanted a new suite of features, a new contract may have been awarded to a lower bidder than the original developers. In this way, the services have both avoided training their own developers and also created countless layers of applications that do not talk to each other — patches on top of patches.
Instead of single sign-on portals – a hallmark of integrated systems – all of the services are well-known for having IT systems that require users to repeatedly log in as they move between them. In an attempt to remedy a particularly absurd instance of this problem, the Army is currently developing personnel management software known as the Integrated Pay and Personnel System — Army, which is promised to replace the 50 disparate personnel systems in use today. |
