I'm astounded that the military uses Windows at all. It would seem a no-brainer to make everyone use a better protected OS. Which *nix is a fine starting inquiry.
The "vendorization" of government and government contracting is astounding. I interned for a government contractor back in college and it was floored by some of the decisions being made.
Basically we were not allowed to use any free/open source software. The reason is that we couldn't "purchase a support contract" for the thing we were using. Not that we would actually try and buy support, company just wanted the capability of getting support.
This drove down to the trivial. I remember we needed a calendar to display a team meetings. There was a kick ass open source calendar that did everything we needed it to. Well we couldn't get it approved because there was no "provided support", I pleaded with them that it's a fucking calendar widget and we don't need support, the response was always "well what if someone has to support this in the future", like lady this isn't some super complicated financial system, it's a fucking calendar.
This example repeats itself throughout the industry. The US Govt has the capability to build their own OS, their own security and tech, but they instead choose to engage with a million different vendors to get their job done. It's like a SaaS startup that gets a bunch of subscriptions to software they may or may not use, just on a much larger and grander scale.
Sure. It's almost as if we live in some kind of dystopian alternative universe where the trillion dollar defense budget is actually just a giant trough for businesses big enough to bribe (sorry, "lobby") government stooges into giving them a cut. I guess in that world, we'd have a lot of PR about having the #1 military, and yet we'd consistently fail at every long term military goal, up to and including basic protection of our allies and meeting promised mutual defense statements. Sure we could invade the odd tropical island and depose a warlord, maybe trade some class A drugs, but actually defending an ally? Oof. It'd be a world where we are, in fact, powerless. The kind of world where we'd say "Russia would be stupid to actually cut off gas to Europe as Europe would have to find another source and then Russia would have no leverage nor market." while at the same time cutting off chip IP to China, who, er, presumably won't develop their own chip IP, and won't become the #1 chip super power, because that's not what the President wants to happen and if it does he'll throw a tantrum and make a pee pee? In that world, the USA is over. The only option the US has for relevance in that world is to go to war with Russia, and bomb that pipeline to Europe while they're at it, just to get Germany off the teat. But it can't. Because "world's #1 military" is just PR.
