Future Combat Systems is a roughly $200 billion weapons program that military officials consider to be the most thorough modernization of the Army since World War II. It all depends on the software, under development by the Army's battalion of contractors, led by Boeing. The software is intended to do what military commanders have until now only dreamed about: give soldiers the power to communicate through a wireless network in near real time with hovering drones; remotely control robots to defuse bombs; fire laser-guided missiles at enemies on the move; and conduct a video teleconference in a tank rumbling about 40 mph in the haze of battle.

Military experts worry about hackers, viruses and the possibility that the software will fail in battle.

The Defense Science Board, an advisory body to the secretary of Defense, raised concerns in a report last year about commercial code created by foreign programmers. "Malicious code is a key concern of the FCS program," the panel said, adding that the board "lacks confidence in current tools for detecting malicious code."
Boeing's Muilenburg said, "We go through a series of tests to defend against all of those threats."

The central part of the software effort is an operating system being developed by Boeing called the System-of-Systems Common Operating Environment, which is supposed to be like Windows, the world's dominant operating system, only better. The system will be embedded in the 14 combat vehicles, robots, drones, sensors and weapons that comprise Future Combat Systems, helping soldiers to communicate with the different systems through a wireless network using radios, relays and satellites.

Boeing and the Army said they chose not to use Microsoft's proprietary software because they didn't want to be beholden to the company, opting instead to develop a Linux-based operating system based on publicly available code.

Microsoft, which does substantial business with the military, declined to comment.

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