Should Sailors Be Able to Reprogram Their Ship?

Should Sailors Be Able to Reprogram Their Ship?


The U.S. Navy’s newest destroyer is automated to an unprecedented degree. Should the crew be allowed to harness it with code?

Simpleχity;1066442287 said:

Should Sailors Be Able to Reprogram Their Ship?


The U.S. Navy’s newest destroyer is automated to an unprecedented degree. Should the crew be allowed to harness it with code?

Click to expand...

Perhaps I'm misreading the question you are asking.

Should Sailors be able to fine tune interfaces on the fly, as the article focuses on? Makes sense.

Should they be able to reprogram the entire ship, meaning weapons systems, etc., as your title seems to imply? I don't think so.

Knowing how electronics can have their glitches, I would think they have sufficient overrides built into that thing.

Simpleχity;1066442287 said:

Should Sailors Be Able to Reprogram Their Ship?


The U.S. Navy’s newest destroyer is automated to an unprecedented degree. Should the crew be allowed to harness it with code?

Click to expand...

I highly doubt they are going to send this ship out to sea on duty and leave the software systems in place totally open to whoever doing whatever they want. We can be fairly certain that NIST standards were applied to the technology on the ship which means controlled release of specific code changing core function.

From the Captain of the ship:

“I mean, we don’t generally change software underway,” he said. “We want to make sure we know what the configuration is, that it’s tested, and we validate it works correctly. So this isn’t a situation where we’re modifying that on the fly.”

It's the US military, with out a doubt there are/will be very specific guidelines on what is allowed or what is prohibited.

Wondered how much this ship cost the Navy. Sticker price shock!

The 610-foot-long warship has an angular shape to minimize its radar signature and cost more than $4.4 billion. It's the most expensive destroyer built for the Navy.

I think it unreasonable for every sailor to be fluent in the programming language of their gear.

I do believe in the option for manual control over automated systems however.

I am going to say that under way and especially in a war time situation, full change control would be in effect,
with command override possible.
The secondary or tertiary controls, likely have more flexibility, simply because the the input state would be unknown.
Actually having the ability to change the programming on the ship would invalidate all the validation testing,
and could create unknown states within the state table.
From a security perspective, the most secure system is one that does it's job, but has no remote access.
The system would accepts inputs within the range of it's programming, and produces the outputs withing the range of it's programming,
but not allow the input variables to alter the programing.

That's a really ugly ship.