Microsoft signed a partnership with the United States Department of Defense earlier this year to upgrade no less than 4 million PCs to Windows 10 by 2017, but it appears that this enthusiastic plan might be put on hold because of old hardware that’s in use by various agencies.

Windows 10 deployment was initially supposed to take place remotely for a smoother and faster transition to the new operating system, but it appears that due to old hardware, professional engineers would have to manually upgrade a significant number of PCs. But the DoD doesn’t have the money to pay them.

The Marine Corps is one such example, as it’s estimated that only 10 percent would support remote upgrading because of old hardware. Furthermore, there’s no budget for hiring engineers to manually perform the upgrade on PCs where remote connections aren’t possible, so everyone’s now afraid that the 2017 upgrade deadline could be missed.

“Our challenges are with hardware, and hardware that is older than a couple years is having more difficulty accepting Windows 10 than hardware that is new. And when you look at what ‘new’ means within DoD, we purchase yesterday’s technology tomorrow. A lot of our brand-new systems are having difficulty with the upgrade as soon as they come out of the box, and we didn’t anticipate that,” Brig. Gen. Dennis Crall, the Marine Corps CIO, was quoted as saying.

After talks with Microsoft, the Marines want to upgrade only a smaller number of PCs to Windows 10 and those that require what they call “technical refresh” will be put on hold until new hardware is purchased.

“There will be consequences”

The Department of Defense, on the other hand, pushes for a Windows 10 upgrade on all PCs no matter their hardware, aiming for some features to be removed in order to ensure that the new operating system can be installed.

“Their assessment was that if the hardware is not compliant for all of the features we want, it’s still better to migrate to the new operating system because you have improved security,” David Cotton, the deputy DoD chief information officer for information enterprise, explained, adding that such a decision would help save costs with new hardware.

But the DoD’s CIO Terry Halvorsen warns that “there will be consequences” in case they do not upgrade to Windows 10 by the announced deadline, explaining that Windows 10 brings so many security improvements that it’s critical for all agencies to upgrade as soon as possible.

“I’m not going to get into the specific repercussions. But the first repercussion would be around how people are spending their money,” he recently said, pointing out that according to his estimates, approximately 80 percent of all laptops and desktops used by the DoD should be on Windows 10 by January.

The remaining 20 percent cannot be upgraded because they are being used on ships or involved in military operations that cannot be put on hold for such a process. The worst thing is that they run “Windows XP and before.”