America’s nuclear arsenal will no longer rely on floppy disks.
The Pentagon has finally scrapped a disco-era missile-launch system that relied on ancient IBM Series/1 computers and floppy disks — largely because young tech-savvy whippersnappers didn’t know how to maintain the prehistoric devices, according to a report.
The Strategic Automated Command and Control System, which is run by the Air Force, dumped the floppy for a “highly-secure solid state digital storage solution system,” three years after the US Government Accountability Office called the system “increasingly obsolete,” the defense news site C4ISRNET reported.
The older system was in place since Gerald Ford was in the White House in the mid-1970s and relied on “a computer language initially used in the 1950s,” the GAO report said.
SACCS is part of a communications network that coordinates nuclear bombers, support aircraft and Minuteman ICBM missiles in silos throughout the US, according to the news outlet.
But military officials said it wasn’t an easy decision to scrap the old system, which they note had not been breached and remained glitch-free since it was put into service in 1975.
“I joke with people and say it’s the Air Force’s oldest IT system,” Air Force Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the 595th Strategic Communications Squadron, told C4SRNET. “But it’s the age that provides the security. You can’t hack something that doesn’t have an IP address.”
Still, maintaining the aging system was increasingly challenging.
Tech-savvy young military and civilian personnel brought in to help maintain the system have struggled to learn how to keep up the archaic gadgets.
“That level of expertise is very hard to replace. It’s not sexy work. It’s soldering irons and micro-minute microscopes,” said Col. Hayley James, the 595th group’s deputy commander.