From Fred Kaplan, MIT Technology Review: “In 2006, Raj Shah was an F16 pilot in the U.S. Air Force, flying combat missions in Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was the war’s worst year, and Shah had a problem. The display screen in his cockpit had no moving map. The GPS showed him ground coördinates, but there was no overlaid image—no moving dot or icon—that showed where he was in relation to those coördinates. “There were times,” he recalls, “when I didn’t know whether I was over Iraq or Iran.” During home leave, he bought an iPAQ, one of the early pocket PCs, and loaded it with a standard, cheap aviation-map program. Back in his F16, he strapped the pad to his lap and relied on it—not the plane’s multimillion-dollar mil-spec software—for navigation. Shah realized that commercial technology was racing ahead of the U.S. military’s own, and that this was a dangerous trend for America’s security, given the nation’s reliance on its technical edge to win wars.”
The Pentagon’s Innovation Experiment
From Fred Kaplan, MIT Technology Review: “In 2006, Raj Shah was an F16 pilot in the U.S. Air Force, flying combat missions in Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was the war’s worst year, and Shah had a problem. The display screen in his cockpit had no moving map. The GPS showed him ground coördinates, but there was no overlaid image—no moving dot or icon—that showed where he was in relation to those coördinates. “There were times,” he recalls, “when I didn’t know whether I was over Iraq or Iran.” During home leave, he bought an iPAQ, one of the early pocket PCs, and loaded it with a standard, cheap aviation-map program. Back in his F16, he strapped the pad to his lap and relied on it—not the plane’s multimillion-dollar mil-spec software—for navigation. Shah realized that commercial technology was racing ahead of the U.S. military’s own, and that this was a dangerous trend for America’s security, given the nation’s reliance on its technical edge to win wars.”
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