Are smart weapons too smart for their own good? The military has been an avid early adopter of advanced technologies since long before the computer era. But critics contend that the increasing complexity of high-tech military systems represents a national Achilles' heel.
A recent case in point: Last year, during experiments to halt computer virus attacks, NATO scientists at the U.N. peacekeeping force headquarters in Pristina, Kosovo, accidentally infected their own computer systems with a virus, according to The Times of London. The virus, designed to steal and forward computer files, reportedly was responsible for leaking a sensitive NATO document in April.
"As we screw all these systems together, they become more vulnerable," says Winn Schwartau, the author of Information Warfare (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1996) and the recently released Cybershock (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000). "It's almost axiomatic: As you get more complexity, you get more vulnerability."
Complexity makes military technology difficult to manage, but development decisions are also exposing new risks. According to Peter Neumann, the moderator of the online Risks Forum and author of Computer-Related Risks (Addison-Wesley, 1995), the Department of Defense "has in recent years come to the conclusion that customised [open] systems are not meeting its critical requirements and has turned to proprietary closed-source systems." Neumann says the US military is "at the mercy of mass-market systems." He says he has advised the department to take a different course: spending its money to make open source software more robust and better suited to the military's needs.
