The US military is widely known as the most technologically advanced on earth, with a
budget that's larger than the next eight militaries combined.
It has brought revolutionary technologies to warfighting such as GPS precision guided
munitions, the fastest aircraft ever created, and the toughest tanks on earth- yet for all
its technological prowess, you'd be surprised to learn that the US military still largely
operates on a 17 year old platform: Windows XP.
The US military is hardly unique in its refusal to upgrade to newer version of windows after
the release of Windows XP, and in 2014 when Microsoft officially ended supporting the
aging platform it still accounted for 30 percent of operating systems worldwide.
Within the pentagon's several million computers, about 3 percent of them were still running
Windows XP.
While the various branches of the military have undergone efforts to replace the aging
operating system, the simple truth is that it's just not as easy as a quick software
upgrade.
Many of the pentagon's computers run what are called mission-critical functions, and
that means that these computers cannot be at risk of failing ever.
New operating systems come with new risks and vulnerabilities, while old software may
have its own flaws but is proven and reliable.
In the chaos of war, you always want to bet on reliable, so the US military spends millions
on contracts with Microsoft to maintain support for platforms from Windows XP to Windows 2003,
and other legacy Microsoft products- support no other organization in the world gets.
Yet legacy computing systems come with serious downsides that only pile up as time goes on.
Legacy systems lag behind state-of-the-art computing, until as described by Cynthia Dion-Schwarz,
a senior scientist at the RAND Corp, “you start to feel like it's being held together
with chewing gum and duct tape.”
Massive performance slowdowns aren't the only problem with using legacy systems though,
as military personnel may actually find it difficult to use these older systems due to
outdated or clunky interfaces and their own exposure to modern systems.
The biggest risk however is cybersecurity- while legacy systems have been thoroughly
explored and vetted over the years that they were supported by Microsoft and in wide use,
they may still contain hidden system flaws deep within their code that could be exploited
by hackers.
Newer systems meanwhile enjoy the benefit of being in active use by millions or billions
of people, with vulnerabilities and flaws being constantly discovered, identified, and
quickly fixed by Microsoft.
It's a strange conundrum for the US military- older systems have the benefit of age and
thus have likely had the bulk of security flaws and bugs already discovered and addressed,
but because fewer and fewer people use them any undiscovered flaws could be that much
more catastrophic if exploited.
Meanwhile newer systems may have a lot of undiscovered flaws and bugs, but due to the
massive amounts of people using them, they can be quickly discovered and corrected.
The solution may sound easy: just use a fraction of the massive Pentagon's budget to upgrade
all computers to the latest version of Windows, how hard could it really be?
Upgrading administrative computers would pose very little challenge even for an organization
as large as the US military, In 2018 the US army upgraded 950,000 office IT computers
to Windows 10 and became the first military branch to complete the Windows 10 upgrade
push.
The US Air Force followed next, hitting its targets in spring 2018 and the US Navy hitting
theirs by summer 2018.
Yet even these massive numbers of computer upgrades are not the whole story.
The truth is that most of the US military's computers aren't sitting in air conditioned
offices as they may be with a large corporation.
Instead most of the US military's computers are flying in aircraft and floating in vessels
all around the world.
Upgrading these computers means tinkering with computer systems that directly support
active military operations and might even directly control navigation or weapon systems
for tanks, warplanes and warships.
Known as “windows boxes” these computers host specialized software that is mission
critical, and that means that any upgrade must be thoroughly tested to ensure it is
compatible with this specialized software.
What would normally be a simple upgrade that asks you to insert a disk and click a mouse
button turns into a delicate operation that requires a new operating system to be thoroughly
vetted to interface and work with the highly specialized software that fires a tank's guns,
regulates a jet fighter's engines, or keeps a multi-billion dollar aircraft carrier on
course.
Plus, that specialized weapon system, navigation, and communications software was typically
built specifically to be used with the legacy windows system that its computer uses.
This can make upgrading to new versions of windows extremely risky and tricky both.
In the words of thomas Sasala, director of the US Army Architecture Integration Center
and chief data officer, “We cannot risk deploying a mission critical solution to the
field and have it fail during a critical mission.”
When lives are at risk and military success is on the line, its no surprise that the US
military is reluctant and slow to upgrade from Windows XP, but the truth is that as
time goes on, keeping its most sensitive mission-critical computer systems running a legacy operating
system may expose them to critical cybersecurity threats.
Upgrades are necessary, but any upgrade must never put the US's warfighting capabilities
at risk, and with all the vetting and testing necessary to ensure that goal, it is likely
that by the time Windows XP is phased out completely from US military computer systems,
the Windows version that they are installed with will already be at the end of its lifetime.
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