If you think Windows 98 is an upgrade nightmare, consider the task of adding a new combat system to a Navy cruiser.
Last week the US Navy acknowledged that the USS Hue City and the USS Vicksburg -- two of the Navy's prize battle cruisers -- will be out of commission until further notice as engineers try to integrate new weapons control systems on the ships.
"Microsoft comes out with upgrades every three years, and they crash all the time," said one Navy source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The Navy comes out with upgrades every five years, but we can't afford for our systems to have any glitches, so we have to make sure that we get it just right," the source said.
While the military has not yet set a completion for the upgrades, the Navy official said it could take at least a year to complete the process, with this upcoming January set as "a major go/no-go point."
"Installation of these systems, and efforts to ensure that they are interoperable with each other, will take longer than previously expected," said a Navy statement on the issue.
The heart of the problem lies with two new systems being built into the ships. The Aegis Baseline 6 system helps defend the vessels against air attacks, and the Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) system gathers and shares radar data from multiple ships. Engineers are having trouble getting the new systems to work with each other and with the ships' legacy software.
A Navy official said that the ships are currently restricted from acting as cruisers in a battle group.
"They can get underway, they can deploy, they can navigate -- that's not the problem," the source said. "But what the fleet commander has decided is that the ships are not going to track aircraft, they're not going to be [involved with] engagements, because they're not 150 percent certain that they're seeing the right picture," the source said.
Hue City and Vicksburg are the first two ships to receive the latest upgrade of Lockheed-Martin's sophisticated Aegis system that is used to defend a ship against air attacks. The Aegis software is written in several languages, including Ada and C++; the latest Aegis upgrade represented an increase from three to eight million lines of software code.
"Right now, we're supporting the Navy team in analyzing their interoperability problem, and we're offering approaches and possible solutions to address the issue," said Lockheed-Martin spokesman Rich Palmay.
"The challenge they're having right now is integrating a new capability into the ship," said a source at Lockheed-Martin. "In a nutshell, that's pretty much all that it is."
The Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC), a hardware and software air target tracking system developed by Raytheon E-Systems, St. Petersburg, was approved for Navy use in September 1996, following many successful live missile tests.
The problem is with neither individual system, but rather with the way they interoperate, or work with one another. The problem is compounded by the a new Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) display system also running aboard the vessels.
A Navy official said that COTS is more challenging than expected -- although the Navy has the license to use the COTS software, they don't have access to its source code. Such code would allows the specialists to "get under the hood" of the software and might help them identify the conflicts.
"As the systems progress and we need more capabilities, we upgrade our systems, just like Microsoft does," said the Navy source.
"But the difference between the Navy and Microsoft is [that] we can't afford a mistake. We can't afford our systems to crash, or things to shut down, or things not to work exactly 100 percent the way they're supposed to."
