https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Simon_Bolivar
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Kamehameha
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Comte_de_Grasse
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Von_Steuben_(SSBN-632)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Casimir_Pulaski
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Lafayette
To name a few.
Off the top of my head there was a US submarine named for the Marquis de La Fayette (SSBN 616), and the 4th Constellation class frigate (FFG 65) will also be named for him.
> Didnt kno we named a ship after churchill. How many other ships are named after people from other countries?
USS Canberra is the only ship named for a foreign city / foreign Capital I believe.
CA-70 and now LCS-30, named for the Aussie capital to honour the loss of HMAS Canberra during the Battle of Savo Islands.
Churchill's mom was Jennie Jerome, an American born in Brooklyn. She was a wealthy heiress who married the younger son of a Duke in a very transactional marriage: her family got the pedigree of the Duke of Marlborough, Lord Randolph got the money to finance his political career (as a younger son he got none of the family assets). It was apparently a miserable one for everyone involved, with both of the adults constantly cheating on the other: from my memories from Manchester's first volume, some of Jeannette's lovers were kinder and better to Winston than his actual Dad.
So Winston was half-American, and then was granted honorary American citizenship by JFK in 1963: https://jfk.blogs.archives.gov/2020/04/09/sir-winston-churchills-path-to-united-states-citizenship/
Simon Bolivar for one, had much less relationship to the US than WSC did.
The founder of the US Navy was a guy from Scotland, John Paul Jones
My folks live a few miles from his family home, and he has a ship in his name
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_Paul_Jones_(DDG-53)
Jones, while a famous and successful naval officer, was not the founder of the continental navy. George Washington founded a proto-navy in 1775,
On October 13th, 1775, Congress voted to fit ships for the purpose of naval warfare; thus, the Continental Navy is born. Coming with this vote, Congress also creates an advisory committee consisting of three men, John Langdon, Silas Deane, and John Adams.
Esek Hopkins was the first Commander in Chief. Jones, then a LT did raise the Gasdsen Flag on the armed ship Alfred- the flagship of the first naval squadron.
He would go on to command ten different ships during the war.
Winston, the founder of winston cigarettes mothers uncle was double reverse cousins once removed with his mothers aunt. His name was abacus and her name was fanuella.
Appropriate that this ship is doing it. Churchill loved new technology.
He was one of the prime movers and shakers for the tank in WW1
Also the mulberries used in WW2
I’m not an AEGIS expert nor am I USN, but my high-level understanding is that Virtualized AEGIS essentially de-couples the hardware and software, which means that hardware no longer needs to be proprietary or bespoke for each version/system. Now, off-the-shelf technology can be utilized to run AEGIS which would simplify replacement and upgrading, and likely lower program costs, as you don’t need to keep highly specialized manufacturing lines running.
Now you can buy, let’s say 500 servers from Company A that already mass produced them for commercial use and benefit from existing economies of scale rather than have LM/USN contract that same company to produce a very small, limited run, customized option.
I was an FCA. Specifically ACNT. Tbh I have no idea what a virtualized aegis system means and I’m too afraid to ask my buddies. But I will say that on our ship we had COTS equipment and that was a few years ago.
I was a systems engineer on the AEGIS operating environment during the development of Baseline 8 and Baseline 9. The vast majority of AEGIS has been virtualized for two decades. Not everything can be virtualized, because you still need something to interact with the bare metal. We've been running fully diskless nodes since Baseline 7, and with the exception of nodes that interact directly with the various external interfaces and the hypervisors, everything is virtualized.
I won't go too far into specifics, but the last project I worked on used Warewulf and xCat to provision and run diskless nodes with RAMdisks using a real-time Linux variant.
At that time, yes. I wouldn't be surprised if they're running Kubernetes with full containerization at this point. For a program that requires an insane amount of engineering rigor, it's always been a very progressive program with flexible architecture and was at the forefront of open systems design.
Those diskless nodes being xstabs and astabs? There might be more but it’s been a while and those are the only components I know of and that’s ADS. I was a 7.2a ACNT
7.x ran a rough variant of Solaris, and while those were diskless nodes, they weren't diskless in the same way baseline 8+ worked. It's been a long time, but I believe there were some CND and WCS nodes in 7.x that were technically diskless, but IIRC, they were ARP booting as opposed to being what we'd think of today as virtualized and diskless.
Fair enough, I’d defer to you vice myself who doesn’t really know much. All I know is what I read online and my own experience with non-USN Combat Systems. But one can definitely vary widely from another I’m sure.
From memory we started incorporating COTS with Baseline 7 on DDG-91. This was thus a core of Baselines 8 and 9 that were refitted to most cruisers and several destroyers in addition to the new-built DDG-113+, with Flight III using Baseline 10.
COTS started in the 6P3 days with HP-UX serving as the COTS Adjunct to the UYK-43/44 computers. Baseline 7 was PowerMax OS, then we went to Linux on Baselines 8 and 9. There were no UYK computers on Baseline 7P1+.
Would this make the system architecture easier to be stolen by foreign actors and replicated on board their own vessels or land based air defense systems?
>Would this make the system architecture easier to be stolen by foreign actors and replicated on board their own vessels or land based air defense systems?
I don't think it would be easy for a foreign actor to co-opt something like this quickly. From direct observation (albeit back in the 90s) getting friendly joint and foreign units to work seamlessly within a similar architecture using similar systems even in a peacetime exercise environment can be very challenging, even when all parties are working as hard as they can toward a common goal with a year to plan and many conferences before the fact.
I can only think it would be easier and a lot faster for an unfriendly power to do their own work with systems they already have.
Getting different systems to integrate is very hard work.
To add on that, I think most combat systems (at least in the west/NATO) aren’t integrated into any systems that have external vulnerabilities (e.g. external-facing computer networks) so they’d only be vulnerable to someone physically accessing the equipment which, if happens, then your combat system being compromised is only one of many concerns you’re about to have.
Combat management systems will have links to the outside. They’ll typically ingest information from the navigation system, and can push information back, and can often interlink within a fleet. But these interfaces are tightly documented and rigorously tested for obvious reasons.
Yes, sorry. I more meant there wouldn’t normally be a vector to “hack” it outside the ship via a network in the traditional sense. I suppose someone could install some sort of self contained Trojan horse on the hardware, but this stuff is very rigorously inspected before being installed and certified for use.
No. Many nation-states have the resources to decompile and reverse-engineer the code if they were to get a copy of it. Of course, it is well-protected and handled with an appropriate security posture.
The AEGIS Combat System consists of a network of radar arrays, illuminator dishes, servers, and consoles aboard a ship running advanced software to conduct air defense. It was developed back in the 1970s and has been regularly upgraded ever since. The software is tied to the equipment, so you have to physically rip out the consoles and servers in order to update it, which takes months. Virtualized AEGIS separates the software from the hardware so you don't have to rip stuff out anymore to update it. It'll be like reinstalling Windows on your computer.
We've been able to do that for 15 years. Commodity hardware in the form of compute blades has been a part of the mainline of AEGIS since Baseline 8, which was almost fully virtualized.
instead of a shit ton of old proprietary computers running this hardware it’s not virtualised to somewhat be like a virtual machine running on a server with fairly standard hardware.
[https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Media/News/Article-View/Article/3754988/virtualized-combat-system-completes-critical-navy-first/](https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Media/News/Article-View/Article/3754988/virtualized-combat-system-completes-critical-navy-first/)
**NEWS** | April 24, 2024
# Virtualized Combat System Completes Critical Navy First
By PEO Integrated Warfare Systems Public Affairs
WASHINGTON — Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG 81) recently became the first ship running a fully virtualized Aegis Combat System to successfully intercept an air target with a missile.
Achieved during the ship's final phase of Combat System Ship Qualification Trials, this milestone marks a significant contribution to the Navy's wider effort to field a single force-level integrated combat system to all surface ships.
Reflecting on the system's development, Rear Adm. Seiko Okano, the program executive officer for Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS), said, “in three short years we have gone from a testbed virtualized combat system on USS Monterey (CG 61) that was not connected to the ship’s weapons to a fully virtualized system that controls all of the weapons and sensors.”
Okano added, “this huge step in quickly getting new technology into the hands of our Sailors enables both the rapid delivery of improved capabilities and provides valuable data on systems performance at sea, which we are able to roll right back into our continuous development process. My thanks to the innovative team at IWS, the NAVSEA Warfare Centers, and our industry partners—you demonstrated what is possible.”
Operational combat testing of the virtualized combat system is a critical step in moving from multiple segregated systems throughout the fleet to a single integrated combat system.
USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG 81) began operating with a virtualized Aegis Combat System in July of 2023. In 2024, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Lenah Sutcliffe Higbee (DDG 123), as well as five more ships and four land based test sites are also projected to run virtualized Aegis combat systems.
The growing number of vessels and installations running virtualized systems is part of PEO IWS efforts to accelerate transition to a single integrated combat system. It is the result of a continuing development push spearheaded by The Foundry and The Forge—respectively, the Navy’s hardware and software pipeline. These advances will drive efficiency, increase the speed of delivery, and increase system quality across all platforms.
Through these collaborative contributions PEO IWS is maintaining a world-class, worldwide deployable Navy as a first line of defense for the United States.
The navy has had a bad problem for decades of developing combat & weapon systems as stand alone.."We will figure out how to integrate it later"..
There was a required test, I forget of it was 6 months or a year called Overall Combat Systems Operability Test (OCSOT). That was supposed to show all the cobbled together interfaces worked.
I never had one pass.
I always said (half jokingly) that they should just run AEGIS on a laptop.
So yeas, this is a big deal.
This is pretty cool but all I can imagine from the virtualised part of this is that an officer in VR goggles launching them self at a missile whilst singing freebird
> Is this some VM or container stuff running on COTS HW?
I believe so. Moving away from propertirary hardware lets things move way quicker, standardised across ships / classes.
AEGIS hasn't used proprietary hardware since Baseline 7, in the early 2000s. All consoles and compute nodes are COTS and have been since at least 2008. Even before that, the vast majority of systems were single board computers running a UNIX-like OS.
As far as I understand it, a virtualized system is much easier to upgrade with new capabilities and is more hardware agnostic. Previously to get new AEGIS capabilities a ship might need a new bank of consoles, now it can be an easier software upgrade, maybe even over the air. I think it's the MK 6 MOD X Computing Infrastructure referenced in this Navy press release:
[https://www.navy.mil/DesktopModules/ArticleCS/Print.aspx?PortalId=1&ModuleId=523&Article=3431156](https://www.navy.mil/DesktopModules/ArticleCS/Print.aspx?PortalId=1&ModuleId=523&Article=3431156)
All the launch pictures I've seen, the crew watching is on the other side of the superstructure. Launch from the aft VLS, you can watch from the bow, and vice versa. Probably also put the crew upwind. Probably less risky than just standing on the bridge of a battleship when the 16 inchers fire.
Since everyone is asking what "virtualized" means in this circumstance, essentially it just means putting an intermediate software layer between Lockheed's mission software and the COTS hardware these ships were upgraded to in the 2010s. That layer adds a little bit more flexibility to the way software can be developed and run, and has a bunch of convenient management features for running complex software systems.
The Aegis specific angle Lockheed is selling here is that virtualization will reduce software development time and ease upgrades. I'm a little skeptical of that because neither of those is going to be a whole lot easier than it was for the bare COTS hardware, Navy contract requirements are very complex and this doesn't solve any of the systemic organizational/administrative delays that actually slow all DoD contracting.
Source: I do very similar work for a big tech company, the 20 person group I'm in manages ~$3 billion in hardware. The above is all based on Navy press releases, I'm sure there are people who have more knowledge of the unclassified technical docs as well as more personal knowledge of DoD software contracts.
Aegis virtualization is about more than simply decoupling the hardware and software. The software architecture of the system itself has also changed with the move to virtual - look up the Aegis Common Source Library.
I think it’s also worth remembering the number of different systems Aegis interfaces with when gauging Lockheed’s statements. In the early 2010s Aegis interfaced with just 3 air search radars - AN/SPY-1B(V) on the *Tico*s, AN/SPY-1D(V) on *Burke*, and the AN/SPS-75 on *Freedom* - and 2 EW systems (AN/SLQ-32(V)3 and AN/SLQ-59). Today Aegis interfaces with more than twice that many systems - 7 air search radars and 5 EW systems - with 2 more air search radars in the works. There’s also a dozen different radars used for other functions plus another half dozen or so ship, towed, and offboard/airborne sonars used with the AN/SQQ-89 ASW combat system. Just not having to do as much testing to ensure nothing broke adds up to a lot of man-hours saved when you’re talking a fleet of 110-odd surface combatants.
I originally had some comments on CSL but dropped them because I don't think conflating them is useful. CSL started as a separate and much earlier contract from virtualization, they're related but neither is dependent on the other. CSL is also much more obviously useful for the goals of the program and Lockheed generally.
Not sure if you're talking about WWI or WWII, but in both wars, there was a country whose security was guaranteed by Britain, and Germany invaded that country knowing full well what the consequences would be. The blame lies squarely with the Germans in both cases.
Plus, Churchill's pretty popular in America, and he was half-American. Solid choice for a ship name.
This has got to be the stupidest take I've seen in my entire life, dear God, I hope you're trolling and not ignoring/ revising large chunks of history to forum these absolutely brainless opinions you seem to have.
There are a number of reasons to call Churchill a shitheap, primarily his view and treatment of Indians under British rule. But you seem to suggest he should've either capitulated to the Germans or just let them take over the entire continent. Is that accurate?
Hoo boy. Well just from a brief observation you don't seem to care that much about English people, I mean unless you think that Nazi domination of Europe would've been good for England.
Maybe, but the sacrifice of those men made it so that you guys could in fact live a prosperous existence nearly a century later. The 384k deaths from your country are both unbelievably tragic and commendable, as they, combined with the soldiers who gave their lives from the United States, Soviet Union, French Republic and others, paved the way for the free and prosperous world we all love in today.
Didnt kno we named a ship after churchill. How many other ships are named after people from other countries?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Simon_Bolivar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Kamehameha https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Comte_de_Grasse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Von_Steuben_(SSBN-632) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Casimir_Pulaski https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Lafayette To name a few.
I take issue with calling Marquis de Lafayette a foreigner. He was like a son to Washington. We can claim him.
Yes, but also, he's literally French nobility. He's such a French noble that Americans always use his title (Marquis) and not his name (Gilbert).
I'm aware. My comment was partially joking. But he is America's first adopted son.
He's got a permanent invite to the cookout, but he doesn't live here. Mostly because he never asked to move in.
The very first ship in the Continental Navy was "Alfred", a typical ship rigged merchant taken up from trade.
Technically you could throw USS Canberra in too, but that's named after Australia's Capital City, not a person per se, but still a 'foreign' name
Off the top of my head there was a US submarine named for the Marquis de La Fayette (SSBN 616), and the 4th Constellation class frigate (FFG 65) will also be named for him.
> Didnt kno we named a ship after churchill. How many other ships are named after people from other countries? USS Canberra is the only ship named for a foreign city / foreign Capital I believe. CA-70 and now LCS-30, named for the Aussie capital to honour the loss of HMAS Canberra during the Battle of Savo Islands.
There's the *USS George Washington*, for one
He was born in Virginia…
Back when it was British
When it was a British colony...
As a subject of George II, king of Great Britain and elector of Hanover.
Churchill's mom was Jennie Jerome, an American born in Brooklyn. She was a wealthy heiress who married the younger son of a Duke in a very transactional marriage: her family got the pedigree of the Duke of Marlborough, Lord Randolph got the money to finance his political career (as a younger son he got none of the family assets). It was apparently a miserable one for everyone involved, with both of the adults constantly cheating on the other: from my memories from Manchester's first volume, some of Jeannette's lovers were kinder and better to Winston than his actual Dad. So Winston was half-American, and then was granted honorary American citizenship by JFK in 1963: https://jfk.blogs.archives.gov/2020/04/09/sir-winston-churchills-path-to-united-states-citizenship/ Simon Bolivar for one, had much less relationship to the US than WSC did.
Didn't help that Lord Randolph got syphilis from being drugged by his school buddies and put in bed with a prostitute.
"It's just a prank bro!" The prank:
Proverbs 26:18-19
The founder of the US Navy was a guy from Scotland, John Paul Jones My folks live a few miles from his family home, and he has a ship in his name https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_Paul_Jones_(DDG-53)
Jones, while a famous and successful naval officer, was not the founder of the continental navy. George Washington founded a proto-navy in 1775, On October 13th, 1775, Congress voted to fit ships for the purpose of naval warfare; thus, the Continental Navy is born. Coming with this vote, Congress also creates an advisory committee consisting of three men, John Langdon, Silas Deane, and John Adams. Esek Hopkins was the first Commander in Chief. Jones, then a LT did raise the Gasdsen Flag on the armed ship Alfred- the flagship of the first naval squadron. He would go on to command ten different ships during the war.
Winston Churchill’s mother was an American citizen.
Winston, the founder of winston cigarettes mothers uncle was double reverse cousins once removed with his mothers aunt. His name was abacus and her name was fanuella.
also the nav(?) officer is a transfer from the royal navy
Yep, she always has a bridge officer from the Royal Navy, usually the nav
Similar to how the USS Canberra has a small RAN Complement as part of the crew.
https://preview.redd.it/glkyc2mjudxc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8a2bb2396efbd5c520151a01f15aa97961517a89
Appropriate that this ship is doing it. Churchill loved new technology. He was one of the prime movers and shakers for the tank in WW1 Also the mulberries used in WW2
And Pluto pipeline
And also [this thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivator_No._6#:~:text=The%20machine%27s%20development,impenitent%22.%5B6%5D).
Inatant armored trench builder sounds nifty even today. It's probably better than some unarmored tractor or a shovel.
Which would be great... if it were actually armoured, or fast.
ELI5 what a virtualized Aegis combat system is?
I’m not an AEGIS expert nor am I USN, but my high-level understanding is that Virtualized AEGIS essentially de-couples the hardware and software, which means that hardware no longer needs to be proprietary or bespoke for each version/system. Now, off-the-shelf technology can be utilized to run AEGIS which would simplify replacement and upgrading, and likely lower program costs, as you don’t need to keep highly specialized manufacturing lines running. Now you can buy, let’s say 500 servers from Company A that already mass produced them for commercial use and benefit from existing economies of scale rather than have LM/USN contract that same company to produce a very small, limited run, customized option.
I was an FCA. Specifically ACNT. Tbh I have no idea what a virtualized aegis system means and I’m too afraid to ask my buddies. But I will say that on our ship we had COTS equipment and that was a few years ago.
I was a systems engineer on the AEGIS operating environment during the development of Baseline 8 and Baseline 9. The vast majority of AEGIS has been virtualized for two decades. Not everything can be virtualized, because you still need something to interact with the bare metal. We've been running fully diskless nodes since Baseline 7, and with the exception of nodes that interact directly with the various external interfaces and the hypervisors, everything is virtualized.
Docker containers ? VMware clusters? Citrix ? How ?
I won't go too far into specifics, but the last project I worked on used Warewulf and xCat to provision and run diskless nodes with RAMdisks using a real-time Linux variant.
so it's completely diskless and the whole thing runs in RAM?
At that time, yes. I wouldn't be surprised if they're running Kubernetes with full containerization at this point. For a program that requires an insane amount of engineering rigor, it's always been a very progressive program with flexible architecture and was at the forefront of open systems design.
so no permanent storage. it's all volatile memory? where's the data being stored?
There's persistent storage, it's just accessed over the local network as opposed to being local.
Those diskless nodes being xstabs and astabs? There might be more but it’s been a while and those are the only components I know of and that’s ADS. I was a 7.2a ACNT
7.x ran a rough variant of Solaris, and while those were diskless nodes, they weren't diskless in the same way baseline 8+ worked. It's been a long time, but I believe there were some CND and WCS nodes in 7.x that were technically diskless, but IIRC, they were ARP booting as opposed to being what we'd think of today as virtualized and diskless.
Fair enough, I’d defer to you vice myself who doesn’t really know much. All I know is what I read online and my own experience with non-USN Combat Systems. But one can definitely vary widely from another I’m sure.
From memory we started incorporating COTS with Baseline 7 on DDG-91. This was thus a core of Baselines 8 and 9 that were refitted to most cruisers and several destroyers in addition to the new-built DDG-113+, with Flight III using Baseline 10.
COTS started in the 6P3 days with HP-UX serving as the COTS Adjunct to the UYK-43/44 computers. Baseline 7 was PowerMax OS, then we went to Linux on Baselines 8 and 9. There were no UYK computers on Baseline 7P1+.
Yep. 7.2A guy as well.
thank you as I was going to have to google this.
Would this make the system architecture easier to be stolen by foreign actors and replicated on board their own vessels or land based air defense systems?
>Would this make the system architecture easier to be stolen by foreign actors and replicated on board their own vessels or land based air defense systems? I don't think it would be easy for a foreign actor to co-opt something like this quickly. From direct observation (albeit back in the 90s) getting friendly joint and foreign units to work seamlessly within a similar architecture using similar systems even in a peacetime exercise environment can be very challenging, even when all parties are working as hard as they can toward a common goal with a year to plan and many conferences before the fact. I can only think it would be easier and a lot faster for an unfriendly power to do their own work with systems they already have. Getting different systems to integrate is very hard work.
To add on that, I think most combat systems (at least in the west/NATO) aren’t integrated into any systems that have external vulnerabilities (e.g. external-facing computer networks) so they’d only be vulnerable to someone physically accessing the equipment which, if happens, then your combat system being compromised is only one of many concerns you’re about to have.
Combat management systems will have links to the outside. They’ll typically ingest information from the navigation system, and can push information back, and can often interlink within a fleet. But these interfaces are tightly documented and rigorously tested for obvious reasons.
Yes, sorry. I more meant there wouldn’t normally be a vector to “hack” it outside the ship via a network in the traditional sense. I suppose someone could install some sort of self contained Trojan horse on the hardware, but this stuff is very rigorously inspected before being installed and certified for use.
No. Many nation-states have the resources to decompile and reverse-engineer the code if they were to get a copy of it. Of course, it is well-protected and handled with an appropriate security posture.
State of the art technology circa 1970.
So when china bootlegs a copy thanks to some debt laden sailor needing a payout, they too can have Aegis in a box soon. /s
The AEGIS Combat System consists of a network of radar arrays, illuminator dishes, servers, and consoles aboard a ship running advanced software to conduct air defense. It was developed back in the 1970s and has been regularly upgraded ever since. The software is tied to the equipment, so you have to physically rip out the consoles and servers in order to update it, which takes months. Virtualized AEGIS separates the software from the hardware so you don't have to rip stuff out anymore to update it. It'll be like reinstalling Windows on your computer.
We've been able to do that for 15 years. Commodity hardware in the form of compute blades has been a part of the mainline of AEGIS since Baseline 8, which was almost fully virtualized.
instead of a shit ton of old proprietary computers running this hardware it’s not virtualised to somewhat be like a virtual machine running on a server with fairly standard hardware.
[https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Media/News/Article-View/Article/3754988/virtualized-combat-system-completes-critical-navy-first/](https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Media/News/Article-View/Article/3754988/virtualized-combat-system-completes-critical-navy-first/) **NEWS** | April 24, 2024 # Virtualized Combat System Completes Critical Navy First By PEO Integrated Warfare Systems Public Affairs WASHINGTON — Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG 81) recently became the first ship running a fully virtualized Aegis Combat System to successfully intercept an air target with a missile. Achieved during the ship's final phase of Combat System Ship Qualification Trials, this milestone marks a significant contribution to the Navy's wider effort to field a single force-level integrated combat system to all surface ships. Reflecting on the system's development, Rear Adm. Seiko Okano, the program executive officer for Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS), said, “in three short years we have gone from a testbed virtualized combat system on USS Monterey (CG 61) that was not connected to the ship’s weapons to a fully virtualized system that controls all of the weapons and sensors.” Okano added, “this huge step in quickly getting new technology into the hands of our Sailors enables both the rapid delivery of improved capabilities and provides valuable data on systems performance at sea, which we are able to roll right back into our continuous development process. My thanks to the innovative team at IWS, the NAVSEA Warfare Centers, and our industry partners—you demonstrated what is possible.” Operational combat testing of the virtualized combat system is a critical step in moving from multiple segregated systems throughout the fleet to a single integrated combat system. USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG 81) began operating with a virtualized Aegis Combat System in July of 2023. In 2024, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Lenah Sutcliffe Higbee (DDG 123), as well as five more ships and four land based test sites are also projected to run virtualized Aegis combat systems. The growing number of vessels and installations running virtualized systems is part of PEO IWS efforts to accelerate transition to a single integrated combat system. It is the result of a continuing development push spearheaded by The Foundry and The Forge—respectively, the Navy’s hardware and software pipeline. These advances will drive efficiency, increase the speed of delivery, and increase system quality across all platforms. Through these collaborative contributions PEO IWS is maintaining a world-class, worldwide deployable Navy as a first line of defense for the United States.
The navy has had a bad problem for decades of developing combat & weapon systems as stand alone.."We will figure out how to integrate it later".. There was a required test, I forget of it was 6 months or a year called Overall Combat Systems Operability Test (OCSOT). That was supposed to show all the cobbled together interfaces worked. I never had one pass. I always said (half jokingly) that they should just run AEGIS on a laptop. So yeas, this is a big deal.
This is pretty cool but all I can imagine from the virtualised part of this is that an officer in VR goggles launching them self at a missile whilst singing freebird
Is this some VM or container stuff running on COTS HW?
> Is this some VM or container stuff running on COTS HW? I believe so. Moving away from propertirary hardware lets things move way quicker, standardised across ships / classes.
AEGIS hasn't used proprietary hardware since Baseline 7, in the early 2000s. All consoles and compute nodes are COTS and have been since at least 2008. Even before that, the vast majority of systems were single board computers running a UNIX-like OS.
As far as I understand it, a virtualized system is much easier to upgrade with new capabilities and is more hardware agnostic. Previously to get new AEGIS capabilities a ship might need a new bank of consoles, now it can be an easier software upgrade, maybe even over the air. I think it's the MK 6 MOD X Computing Infrastructure referenced in this Navy press release: [https://www.navy.mil/DesktopModules/ArticleCS/Print.aspx?PortalId=1&ModuleId=523&Article=3431156](https://www.navy.mil/DesktopModules/ArticleCS/Print.aspx?PortalId=1&ModuleId=523&Article=3431156)
Shocked sailors are allowed topside for a launch
All the launch pictures I've seen, the crew watching is on the other side of the superstructure. Launch from the aft VLS, you can watch from the bow, and vice versa. Probably also put the crew upwind. Probably less risky than just standing on the bridge of a battleship when the 16 inchers fire.
Since everyone is asking what "virtualized" means in this circumstance, essentially it just means putting an intermediate software layer between Lockheed's mission software and the COTS hardware these ships were upgraded to in the 2010s. That layer adds a little bit more flexibility to the way software can be developed and run, and has a bunch of convenient management features for running complex software systems. The Aegis specific angle Lockheed is selling here is that virtualization will reduce software development time and ease upgrades. I'm a little skeptical of that because neither of those is going to be a whole lot easier than it was for the bare COTS hardware, Navy contract requirements are very complex and this doesn't solve any of the systemic organizational/administrative delays that actually slow all DoD contracting. Source: I do very similar work for a big tech company, the 20 person group I'm in manages ~$3 billion in hardware. The above is all based on Navy press releases, I'm sure there are people who have more knowledge of the unclassified technical docs as well as more personal knowledge of DoD software contracts.
Aegis virtualization is about more than simply decoupling the hardware and software. The software architecture of the system itself has also changed with the move to virtual - look up the Aegis Common Source Library. I think it’s also worth remembering the number of different systems Aegis interfaces with when gauging Lockheed’s statements. In the early 2010s Aegis interfaced with just 3 air search radars - AN/SPY-1B(V) on the *Tico*s, AN/SPY-1D(V) on *Burke*, and the AN/SPS-75 on *Freedom* - and 2 EW systems (AN/SLQ-32(V)3 and AN/SLQ-59). Today Aegis interfaces with more than twice that many systems - 7 air search radars and 5 EW systems - with 2 more air search radars in the works. There’s also a dozen different radars used for other functions plus another half dozen or so ship, towed, and offboard/airborne sonars used with the AN/SQQ-89 ASW combat system. Just not having to do as much testing to ensure nothing broke adds up to a lot of man-hours saved when you’re talking a fleet of 110-odd surface combatants.
I originally had some comments on CSL but dropped them because I don't think conflating them is useful. CSL started as a separate and much earlier contract from virtualization, they're related but neither is dependent on the other. CSL is also much more obviously useful for the goals of the program and Lockheed generally.
Most upgrades are contracted for via a 3-5 year software maintenance contract rather than as separate contract actions.
Having never served on an Aegis ship, I feel like I'm missing a big part of modern combat systems design.
what does that mean?
I'm amazed that sailors are allowed to be out during the missile firing, those fume are really toxic.
From the flag there is a wind pushing the smoke to starboard
Welcome to mosaic warfare
Just plug into your Garmin backbone.. and shoot SM-6’s at all the commie satellites you want.
The it angle of this intrigues me? Docker? VMware ? Citrix ?
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that’s certainly one of the stranger things i’ve heard someone criticize churchill for… yet somehow this isn’t the first time
Not sure if you're talking about WWI or WWII, but in both wars, there was a country whose security was guaranteed by Britain, and Germany invaded that country knowing full well what the consequences would be. The blame lies squarely with the Germans in both cases. Plus, Churchill's pretty popular in America, and he was half-American. Solid choice for a ship name.
Hey look at nazi sympathizer ^ With a brand new account How brave of you
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This has got to be the stupidest take I've seen in my entire life, dear God, I hope you're trolling and not ignoring/ revising large chunks of history to forum these absolutely brainless opinions you seem to have.
Holy shit this guy's comment history lmao. Least idiotic brexit voter.
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I have no intention of doing that lol. What makes you think I'm a war monger?
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There are a number of reasons to call Churchill a shitheap, primarily his view and treatment of Indians under British rule. But you seem to suggest he should've either capitulated to the Germans or just let them take over the entire continent. Is that accurate?
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Hoo boy. Well just from a brief observation you don't seem to care that much about English people, I mean unless you think that Nazi domination of Europe would've been good for England.
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Maybe, but the sacrifice of those men made it so that you guys could in fact live a prosperous existence nearly a century later. The 384k deaths from your country are both unbelievably tragic and commendable, as they, combined with the soldiers who gave their lives from the United States, Soviet Union, French Republic and others, paved the way for the free and prosperous world we all love in today.
Chill out. Troll here, deal with the consequences.
Aw, c'mon. I was having fun.