Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water

The Navys Smart Ship technology may not be as smart as the service contends.

Although PCs have reduced workloads for sailors aboard the Aegis missile cruiser USS

Yorktown, software glitches resulted in system failures and crippled ship operations,

according to Navy officials.

Navy brass have called the Yorktown Smart Ship pilot a success in reducing manpower,

maintenance and costs. The Navy began running shipboard applications under Microsoft

Windows NT so that fewer sailors would be needed to control key ship functions.

But the Navy last fall learned a difficult lesson about automation: The very

information technology on which the ships depend also makes them vulnerable. The Yorktown

last September suffered a systems failure when bad data was fed into its computers during

maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, Va.

The ship had to be towed into the Naval base at Norfolk, Va., because a database

overflow caused its propulsion system to fail, according to Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian

engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk.

We are putting equipment in the engine room that we cannot maintain and, when it

fails, results in a critical failure, DiGiorgio said. It took two days of pierside

maintenance to fix the problem.

The Yorktown has been towed into port after other systems failures, he said.

Atlantic Fleet officials acknowledged that the Yorktown last September experienced what

they termed an engineering local area network casualty, but denied that the

ships systems failure lasted as long as DiGiorgio said. The Yorktown was dead in the

water for about two hours and 45 minutes, fleet officials said, and did not have to be

towed in.

This is the only time this casualty has occurred and the only propulsion casualty

involved with the control system since May 2, 1997, when software configuration was

frozen, Vice Adm. Henry Giffin, commander of the Atlantic Fleets Naval Surface

Force, reported in an Oct. 24, 1997, memorandum.

Giffin wrote the memo to describe what really happened in hope of clearing the

scuttlebutt surrounding the incident, he noted.

The Yorktown lost control of its propulsion system because its computers were unable to

divide by the number zero, the memo said. The Yorktowns Standard Monitoring Control

System administrator entered zero into the data field for the Remote Data Base Manager

program. That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and miniature

remote terminal units, the memo said.

The program administrators are trained to bypass a bad data field and change the value

if such a problem occurs again, Atlantic Fleet officials said.

But the Yorktowns failure in September 1997 was not as simple as

reported, DiGiorgio said.

If you understand computers, you know that a computer normally is immune to the

character of the data it processes, he wrote in the June U.S. Naval Institutes

Proceedings Magazine. Your $2.95 calculator, for example, gives you a zero when you

try to divide a number by zero, and does not stop executing the next set of instructions.

It seems that the computers on the Yorktown were not designed to tolerate such a simple

failure.

The Navy reduced the Yorktown crew by 10 percent and saved more than $2.8 million a

year using the computers. The ship uses dual 200-MHz Pentium Pros from Intergraph Corp. of

Huntsville, Ala. The PCs and server run NT 4.0 over a high-speed, fiber-optic LAN.

Despite the USS Yorktowns setbacks, the Navy plans to use Smart Ship

technology on other classes of ships.

The Naval Sea Systems Command in May awarded Litton Integrated Systems

Corp. of Woodland Hills, Calif., a $138.6 million contract to build Engineering Control

System Equipment and Integrated Bridge Systems for CG-47 Class Aegis cruisers. The Navy

also might install the equipment on DDG-51 class destroyers.

Electronic Design Inc. of Metairie, La., filed a protest of the award in

late May with the General Accounting Office. The Navy has issued a stop-work order that

will last until GAO rules on the protest.

Smart Ship technology is also on the amphibious ship USS Rushmore, Navy

officials said.

Gregory Slabodkin







Blame it on the OS

But according to DiGiorgio, who in an interview said he has serviced automated control

systems on Navy ships for the past 26 years, the NT operating system is the source of the

Yorktowns computer problems.

NT applications aboard the Yorktown provide damage control, run the ships control

center on the bridge, monitor the engines and navigate the ship when under way.

Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is

similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor, DiGiorgio said.

Pacific and Atlantic fleets in March 1997 selected NT 4.0 as the standard OS for both

networks and PCs as part of the Navys Information Technology for the 21st Century

initiative. Current guidance approved by the Navys chief information officer calls

for all new applications to run under NT.

Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis

Program Executive Office, said there have been numerous software failures associated with

NT aboard the Yorktown.

Refining that is an ongoing process, Redman said. Unix is a better

system for control of equipment and machinery, whereas NT is a better system for the

transfer of information and data. NT has never been fully refined and there are times when

we have had shutdowns that resulted from NT.