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Expeditors International of Washington, Inc. provides logistics services in the Americas, North Asia, South Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India. The company offers airfreight services, such as air freight consolidation and forwarding; ocean freight and ocean services, including ocean freight consolidation, direct ocean forwarding, and order management; customs brokerage, intra-continental ground transportation and delivery, and warehousing and distribution services; and customs clearance, purchase order management, vendor consolidation, time-definite transportation services, temperature-controlled transit, cargo insurance, specialized cargo monitoring and tracking, and other supply chain solutions. It also provides optimization, trade compliance, consulting, cargo security, and solutions. In addition, it acts as a freight consolidator or as an agent for the airline, which carries the shipment. Further, the company provides ancillary services that include preparation of shipping and customs documentation, packing, crating, insurance services, negotiation of letters of credit, and the preparation of documentation to comply with local export laws. Its customers include retailing and wholesaling, electronics, technology, and industrial and manufacturing companies. Expeditors International of Washington, Inc. was incorporated in 1979 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.

Expeditors Intl. of Washington

The Second Deluge by Garrett Putman Serviss is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE FIRST DROPS OF THE DELUGE THE FIRST DROPS OF THE DELUGE The utterance of the Carnegie Institution indeed fell flat, and Cosmo Versál's star reigned in the ascendent. He pushed his preparations with amazing speed, and not only politics, but even the war that had just broken out in South America was swallowed up in the newspapers by endless descriptions of the mysterious proceedings at Mineola. Cosmo still found time every day to write articles and to give out interviews; and Joseph Smith was kept constantly on the jump, running for street-cars or trains, or leaping, with his long coat flapping, into and out of elevators on ceaseless missions to the papers, the scientific societies, and the meetings of learned or unlearned bodies which had been persuaded to investigate the subject of the coming flood. Between the work of preparation and that of proselytism it is difficult to see how Cosmo found time to sleep. Day by day the Ark of Safety rose higher upon its great platform, its huge metallic ribs and broad, bulging sides glinting strangely in the unbroken sunshine—for, as if imitating the ominous quiet before an earthquake, the July sky had stripped itself of all clouds. No thunder-storms broke the serenity of the long days, and never had the overarching heavens seemed so spotless and motionless in their cerulean depths. All over the world, as the news dispatches showed, the same strange calm prevailed. Cosmo did not fail to call attention to this unparalleled repose of nature as a sure prognostic of the awful event in preparation. The heat became tremendous. Hundreds were stricken down in the blazing streets. Multitudes fled to the seashore, and lay panting under umbrellas on the burning sands, or vainly sought relief by plunging into the heated water, which, rolling lazily in with the tide, felt as if it had come from over a boiler. Still, perspiring crowds constantly watched the workmen, who struggled with the overpowering heat, although Cosmo had erected canvas screens for them and installed a hundred immense electric fans to create a breeze. Beginning with five hundred men, he had, in less than a month, increased his force to nearer five thousand, many of whom, not engaged in the actual construction, were preparing the materials and bringing them together. The ark was being made of pure levium, the wonderful new metal which, although already employed in the construction of aeroplanes and the framework of dirigible balloons, had not before been used for shipbuilding, except in the case of a few small boats, and these used only in the navy. For mere raw material Cosmo must have expended an enormous sum, and his expenses were quadrupled by the fact that he was compelled, in order to save time, practically to lease several of the largest steel plants in the country. Fortunately levium was easily rolled into plates, and the supply was sufficient, owing to the discovery two years before of an expeditious process of producing the metal from its ores. The wireless telegraph and telephone offices were besieged by correspondents eager to send inland, and all over Europe and Asia, the latest particulars of the construction of the great ark. Nobody followed Cosmo's advice or example, but everybody was intensely interested and puzzled. At last the government officials found themselves forced to take cognizance of the affair. They could no longer ignore it after they discovered that it was seriously interfering with the conduct of public business. Cosmo Versál's pressing orders, accompanied by cash, displaced or delayed orders of the government commanding materials for the navy and the air fleet. In consequence, about the middle of July he received a summons to visit the President of the United States. Cosmo hurried to Washington on the given date, and presented his card at the White House. He was shown immediately into the President's reception-room, where he found the entire Cabinet in presence. As he entered he was the focus of a formidable battery of curious and not too friendly eyes. President Samson was a large, heavy man, more than six feet tall. Every member of his Cabinet was above the average in avoirdupois, and the heavyweight president of the Carnegie Institution, Professor Pludder, who had been specially invited, added by his presence to the air of ponderosity that characterized the assemblage. All seemed magnified by the thin white garments which they wore on account of the oppressive heat. Many of them had come in haste from various summer resorts, and were plainly annoyed by the necessity of attending at the President's command. Cosmo Versál was the only cool man there, and his diminutive form presented a striking contrast to the others. But he looked as if he carried more brains than all of them put together. He was not in the least overawed by the hostile glances of the statesmen. On the contrary, his lips perceptibly curled, in a half-disdainful smile, as he took the big hand which the President extended to him. As soon as Cosmo Versál had sunk into the embrace of a large easy chair, the President opened the subject. "I have directed you to come," he said in a majestic tone, "in order the sooner to dispel the effects of your unjustifiable predictions and extraordinary proceedings on the public mind—and, I may add, on public affairs. Are you aware that you have interfered with the measures of this government for the defense of the country? You have stepped in front of the government, and delayed the beginning of four battleships which Congress has authorized in urgent haste on account of the threatening aspect of affairs in the East? I need hardly say to you that we shall, if necessary, find means to set aside the private agreements under which you are proceeding, as inimical to public interests, but you have already struck a serious blow at the security of your country." The President pronounced the last sentence with oratorical unction, and Cosmo was conscious of an approving movement of big official shoulders around him. The disdain deepened on his lips. After a moment's pause the President continued: "Before proceeding to extremities I have wished to see you personally, in order, in the first place, to assure myself that you are mentally responsible, and then to appeal to your patriotism, which should lead you to withdraw at once an obstruction so dangerous to the nation. Do you know the position in which you have placed yourself?" Cosmo Versál got upon his feet and advanced to the center of the room like a little David. Every eye was fixed upon him. His voice was steady, but intense with suppressed nervousness. "Mr. President," he said, "you have accused me of obstructing the measures of the government for the defense of the country. Sir, I am trying to save the whole human race from a danger in comparison with which that of war is infinitesimal—a danger which is rushing down upon us with appalling speed, and which will strike every land on the globe simultaneously. Within seven months not a warship or any other existing vessel will remain afloat." The listeners smiled, and nodded significantly to one another, but the speaker only grew more earnest. "You think I am insane," he said, "but the truth is you are hoodwinked by official stupidity. That man," pointing at Professor Pludder, "who knows me well, and who has had all my proofs laid before him, is either too thick-headed to understand a demonstration or too pig-headed to confess his own error." "Come, come," interrupted the President sternly, while Professor Pludder flushed very red, "this will not do! Indulge in no personalities here. I have, strained a point in offering to listen to you at all, and I have invited the head of the greatest of our scientific societies to be present, with the hope that here before us all he might convince you of your folly, and thus bring the whole unfortunate affair promptly to an end." "He convince me !" cried Cosmo Versál disdainfully. "He is incapable of understanding the A, B, C of my work. But let me tell you this, Mr. President—there are men in his own council who are not so blind. I know what occurred at the recent meeting of that council, and I know that the ridiculous announcement put forth in its name to deceive the public was whipped into shape by him, and does not express the real opinion of many of the members." Professor Pludder's face grew redder than ever. "Name one!" he thundered. "Ah," said Cosmo sneeringly, "that hits hard, doesn't it? You want me to name one; well, I'll name three. What did Professor Alexander Jones and Professor Abel Able say about the existence of watery nebula, and what was the opinion expressed by Professor Jeremiah Moses about the actual approach of one out of the northern sky, and what it could do if it hit the earth? What was the unanimous opinion of the entire council about the correctness of my mathematical work? And what," he continued, approaching Professor Pludder and shaking his finger up at him—"what have you done with those three dispatches from Iceland, the North Cape, and Kamchatka, which absolutely confirmed my announcement that the nebula was already visible?" Professor Pludder began stammeringly: "Some spy—" "Ah," cried Cosmo, catching him up, "a spy, hey? Then, you admit it! Mr. President, I beg you to notice that he admits it. Sir, this is a conspiracy to conceal the truth. Great Heaven, the world is on the point of being drowned, and yet the pride of officialism is so strong in this plodder—Pludder—and others of his ilk that they'd sooner take the chance of letting the human race be destroyed than recognize the truth!" Cosmo Versál spoke with such tremendous concentration of mental energy, and with such evident sincerity of conviction, and he had so plainly put Professor Pludder to rout, that the President, no less than the other listening statesmen, was thrown into a quandary. There was a creaking of heavily burdened chairs, a ponderous stir all round the circle, while a look of perplexity became visible on every face. Professor Pludder's conduct helped to produce the change of moral atmosphere. He had been so completely surprised by Cosmo's accusation, based on facts which he had supposed were known only to himself and the council, that he was unable for a minute to speak at all, and before he could align his faculties his triumphant little opponent renewed the attack. "Mr. President," he said, laying his hand on the arm of Mr. Samson's big chair, which was nearly on a level with his breast, and speaking with persuasive earnestness, "you are the executive head of a mighty nation—the nation that sets the pace for the world. It is in your power to do a vast, an incalculable, service to humanity. One official word from you would save millions upon millions of lives. I implore you, instead of interfering with my work, to give instant order for the construction of as many arks, based upon the plans I have perfected, as the navy yard can possibly turn out. Issue a proclamation to the people, warning them that this is their only chance of escape." By a curious operation of the human mind, this speech cost Cosmo nearly all the advantage that he had previously gained. His ominous suggestion of a great nebula rushing out of the heavens to overwhelm the earth had immensely impressed the imagination of his hearers, and his uncontradicted accusation that Professor Pludder was concealing the facts had almost convinced them that he was right. But when he mentioned "arks," the strain was relieved, and a smile broke out on the broad face of the President. He shook his head, and was about to speak, when Cosmo, perceiving that he had lost ground, changed his tactics. "Still you are incredulous!" he exclaimed. "But the proof is before you! Look at the blazing heavens! The annals of meteorology do not record another such summer as this. The vanguard of the fatal nebula is already upon us. The signs of disaster are in the sky. But, note what I say—this is only the first sign. There is another following on its heels which may be here at any moment. To heat will succeed cold, and as we rush through the tenuous outer spirals the earth will alternately be whipped with tempests of snow and sleet, and scorched by fierce outbursts of solar fire. For three weeks the atmosphere has been heated by the inrush of invisible vapor—but look out, I warn you, for the change that is impending!" These extraordinary words, pronounced with the wild air of a prophet, completed the growing conviction of the listeners that they really had a madman to deal with, and Professor Pludder, having recovered his self—command, rose to his feet. "Mr. President," he began, "the evidence which we have just seen of an unbalanced mind—" He got no further. A pall of darkness suddenly dropped upon the room. An inky curtain seemed to have fallen from the sky. At the same time the windows were shaken by tremendous blasts of wind, and, as the electric lights were hastily turned on, huge snowflakes, intermingled with rattling hailstones, were seen careering outside. In a few seconds several large panes of glass were broken, and the chilling wind, sweeping round the apartment, made the teeth of the thinly clad statesmen chatter, while the noise of the storm became deafening. The sky lightened, but at the same moment dreadful thunderpeals shook the building. Two or three trees in the White House grounds were struck by the bolts, and their broken branches were driven through the air and carried high above the ground by the whirling winds, and one of them was thrown against the building with such force that for a moment it seemed as if the wall had been shattered. After the first stunning effect of this outbreak of the elements had passed, everybody rushed to the windows to look out—everybody except Cosmo Versál, who remained standing in the center of the room. "I told you!" he said; but nobody listened to him. What they saw outside absorbed every faculty. The noise was so stunning that they could not have heard him. We have said that the air lightened after the passage of the first pall of darkness, but it was not the reappearance of the sun that caused the brightening. It was an awful light, which seemed to be born out of the air itself. It had a menacing, coppery hue, continually changing in character. The whole upper atmosphere was choked with dense clouds, which swirled and tumbled, and twisted themselves into great vortical rolls, spinning like gigantic millshafts. Once, one of these vortexes shot downward, with projectile speed, rapidly assuming the terrible form of the trombe of a tornado, and where it struck the ground it tore everything to pieces—trees, houses, the very earth itself were ground to powder and then whirled aloft by the resistless suction. Occasionally the darkness returned for a few minutes, as if a cover had been clapped upon the sky, and then, again, the murk would roll off, and the reddish gleam would reappear. These swift alternations of impenetrable gloom and unearthly light shook the hearts of the dumfounded statesmen even more than the roar and rush of the storm. A cry of horror broke from the onlookers when a man and a woman suddenly appeared trying to cross the White House grounds to reach a place of comparative safety, and were caught up by the wind, clinging desperately to each other, and hurled against a wall, at whose base they fell in a heap. Then came another outburst of lightning, and a vicious bolt descended upon the Washington Monument, and, twisting round it, seemed to envelop the great shaft in a pulsating corkscrew of blinding fire. The report that instantly followed made the White House dance upon its foundations, and, as if that had been a signal, the flood-gates of the sky immediately opened, and rain so dense that it looked like a solid cataract of water poured down upon the earth. The raging water burst into the basement of the building, and ran off in a shoreless river toward the Potomac. The streaming rain, still driven by the wind, poured through the broken windows, driving the President and the others to the middle of the room, where they soon stood in rills of water soaking the thick carpet. They were all as pale as death. Their eyes sought one another's faces in dumb amazement. Cosmo Versál alone retained perfect self-command. In spite of his slight stature he looked their master. Raising his voice to the highest pitch, in order to be heard, he shouted: "These are the first drops of the Deluge! Will you believe now?" About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Garrett Putman Serviss (2005). The Second Deluge. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9194/pg9194.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

THE FIRST DROPS OF THE DELUGE

THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN

The 21st anniversary of the incident offers an opportunity to reflect upon computer system defects, human error, process flaws, and the best principles and practices for solution delivery in the IT industry. In this blog and my upcoming book**, Bugs: A Short History of Computer System Failure**, I will chronicle some important system failures in the past and discuss ideas for improving the future of system quality. As information technology becomes increasingly woven into Life, the quality of hardware and software impacts our commerce, health, infrastructure, military, politics, science, security, and transportation. The Big Idea is that we have no choice but to get better at delivering technology solutions because our lives depend on it. USS Yorktown On 21 September 1997, the USS Yorktown halted for almost three hours during training maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, Virginia due to a error in a database application that propagated throughout the ship’s control systems. The Yorktown had successfully served the US Navy since 1984 without a major incident during multiple combat operations; however, as part of an IT modernization program dubbed Smart Ship, its control systems were modified in 1996 to use a network of PC’s running Windows NT 4.0. This essay will examine the details of the software error that stopped the Yorktown and discuss the IT matters that contributed to the system failure. divide-by-zero USS Yorktown at anchor The USS Yorktown (CG-48) was launched on 17 January 1983 and commissioned on 4 July 1984. A Ticonderoga-class cruiser, the Yorktown was designed to use the American system which integrated computers with radar data to track and guide weapons. Weighing nearly 10,000 tons and spanning 173 meters in length, the Yorktown supported a variety of armaments including two Mark-26 surface to air missiles (SAMs), eight RGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship/anti-submarine missiles, two Mark-32 torpedo tubes, and four lightweight mounted guns. Propelled by four General Electric gas turbine engines with 80,000 horsepower, the Yorktown could reach speeds greater than 30 knots. The ship could also carry two Sikorsky Seahawk helicopters, the Navy relative of the US Army’s Blackhawk. The Yorktown’s weapons, aerial resources, speed, and crew of 33 officers and more than 340 enlisted personnel made it one of the US Navy’s most versatile military units on the water’s surface, able to support carrier battle formations, amphibious assaults, escort missions, and interdiction assignments. Aegis The Yorktown ship was built in sections, called modules. The modules were connected together to form the ship’s hull; once done, the deckhouse sections were then lifted aboard. During module component construction, hundreds of subassemblies were made and equipped with piping, ventilation ducts, and other shipboard hardware. These subassemblies were then joined to make the modules, which were then outfitted with larger equipment, such as electrical panels as well as propulsion and power generation machinery. At the Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, this modular process is supported by a (CAD) and Manufacturing program; the CAD system directs the operation of digital equipment used to cut steel plates, cut and bend pipes, and form sheet metal assemblies. For launching, the ship was moved across land several hundred yards by a wheel-on-rail transfer system to the floating dry dock. The dock was then moved towards the water’s edge and ballasted down in order for the ship to float free; thereafter the ship was moved to an outfitting berth in preparation for the traditional christening ceremony. Upon completion of post-launch outfitting, the ship went through extensive dockside and at-sea testing to ensure the ship and crew were ready to work safely at sea. Litton Industries needed 15 months to manufacture the Yorktown; the ship cost approximately $1 billion to build and $28 million to operate annually. Computer-Aided Design Bezzavettny (left) collides with Yorktown (right) In its first deployment during 1985–1986, the Yorktown undertook several successful expeditions including the interception of the Achille Lauro hijackers, two Black Sea excursions, and three military operations off the Libyan coast. During its second and third deployments, it participated in several US and NATO exercises around Europe and the Mediterranean including the “right of innocent passage” on 12 February 1988 in Soviet territorial waters which triggered a collision incident with the Soviet frigate, , that some observers have called the “last incident of the Cold War”. It also played a key role in Operation Provide Comfort to Kurdish refugees during the US Iraqi War of 1992. In its fourth and fifth deployments spanning the years of 1993–1995, it served in counter-narcotic operations in the Caribbean as well as UN sponsored actions related to the war in Yugoslavia. By this time, the Yorktown and its crew had earned awards for naval gunfire support (1987), electronic warfare excellence (1991), sustained combat readiness (1992), and superior safety (1993). Bezzavettny In October 1995, the US Naval Research Advisory Committee (NRAC) published a paper recommending approaches to reduce manning; the report’s thesis was that culture and tradition were the obstacles to lower staff and lifecycle costs — not technology. Thus in December 1995, the US Navy established the (SSPO) to pursue the goal of reducing staff while maintaining combat readiness through new technology and process changes. So-called “smart ships” would consist of several new systems to automate navigation, monitor equipment sensors, control machinery and fuel, and communicate over both fiber optic and wireless networks. The SSPO chose the Yorktown as its first testbed, and by December 1996, the ship was equipped with the first prototype of the Smart Ship System. The system was designed and built by a subsidiary of Litton Industries; it consisted of a Local Area Network (LAN) of 27 client PC’s communicating over fiber optic cable with a server. All the Smart Ship machines ran Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. The system was projected to save $2.8 million per year by reducing manual operations and maintenance costs associated with shrinking the ship’s staff by 4 officers and about 40 enlisted personnel. In May 1997, the Yorktown with reduced crew successfully completed a five month deployment serving in Caribbean counter-narcotic operations as well as performed test exercises alongside the USS George Washington in her carrier battle group. The Navy Man Power Analysis Center (MPAC) and Operational Test and Evaluation Force (OPTEVFOR) groups subsequently reviewed the Yorktown’s crew and ship capabilities and concluded that the ship could meet its operational requirements. Smart Ship Program Office On 21 September 1997, the USS Yorktown was performing training exercises off the coast of Cape Charles, Virginia when a crew member began troubleshooting a fuel valve that was physically closed, but according to the Smart Ship’s Standard Machinery Control System (SMCS) was open. The technician tried to digitally calibrate and reset the fuel valve by entering a 0 value for one of the valve’s component properties into the SMCS Remote Database Manager (RDM). The RDM program then attempted to perform a division operation by the valve property; a was thrown, not caught by the program, and the RDM crashed. Since other Smart Ship systems were dependent on RDM availability across the LAN, these other SMCS components including ones controlling the motor and propulsion machinery began to fail in a domino-like sequence until the ship stopped dead in the water. The crew was able to troubleshoot and restart the ship’s systems after two hours and forty-five minutes, and the Yorktown returned to base in Norfolk, Virginia. divide-by-zero arithmetic exception There are conflicting reports on several aspects of the Yorktown incident that we shall explore now. One controversy is whether the Yorktown returned back to base on its own or was . Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian contract engineer with 26 years of experience working on naval control systems in the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center, initially stated that the ship had been towed in a critical article he penned in the June 1998 issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings (NIP) journal. His account was later disputed by Captain Richard Rushton, the commanding officer of the Yorktown; Rushton stated that the Yorktown had two FFG-7 emergency power units that were activated when the propulsion system failed. Rushton also indicated that similar program crashes had occurred twice since the Smart Ship installation due to incorrect values entered into the RDM; in each case, the ship’s systems were restarted, RDM values were reset, and the ship performed as expected and required. In the same June 1998 article of the NIP, DiGiorgio elaborated further on the incident and alleged that the ship needed two days of pierside repairs and maintenance. However, in the August 1998 issue of the the Government Computer News (GCN) magazine, DiGiorgio retracted his earlier declaration and suggested that GCN reporters had altered his original story; GCN published a statement standing by its journalists and the original narrative. While Rushton’s story does explain what we know, the retraction by DiGiorgio suggests intense organizational and political pressure to suppress the full facts of the story. The other major point of contention was whether usage of contributed to the failure. Windows NT 4.0 was selected in March 1997 as the standard OS for both networks and PC’s as part of the Navy’s Information Technology for the 21st century initiative (IT-21). Bill Gates even went so far as to nominate the Smart Ship program to the Computer World and Smithsonian Awards. DiGiorgio assigned some blame to Windows NT in his June 1998 article, stating that “using Windows NT… on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor.” Ron Redman, deputy IT director of the Aegis Program Executive Office, is quoted in a June issue 1998 of GCN as saying that “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.” However, Rushton again defended the Navy choice of operating system, stating that “NT was never the cause of any problem on the ship. The problems were all in programs, databases, and code within the individual pieces of software we were using.” Based on the public record, while there was organizational pressure to use Windows NT, this decision does not appear to have directly contributed to the Yorktown incident notwithstanding the negative comments from DiGiorgio and Redman. towed by another vessel Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 The US Navy CIO office commissioned an inquiry led by Ron Turner into the USS Yorktown incident. Although the Navy’s investigation report was not made public, several lessons can be learned from this event that are useful for software development professionals. Software applications should before processing it. Such validation can prevent operator error, maintain system reliability as well as enforce security controls. The recommendation to validate input data comes from multiple trusted sources including the Top 25 List for Preventing Software Vulnerabilities by , and , the paper by Tsipenyuk, Chess, and McGraw, and the book by McGraw and Viega. Several serious problems can result from not validating data such as arithmetic overflow, buffer overflow, command/data injection, cross-site scripting, and remote process control. Had the RDM program validated the 0 value for the fuel valve component before storing it, then the Yorktown might not have stalled. validate input data CVE OWASP SANS Pernicious Kingdoms Building Secure Software Software programs should also catch and . Exception handling is the process for detecting and reacting to computational anomalies, events or exceptional conditions that require a different flow than normal instruction execution. A hardware example of exception handling is the IEEE 754 standard for floating point arithmetic which defines values for various exceptions (e.g. infinity for divide-by-zero), provides status flags for later checking as to what kind of exception occurred, and then offers the optional registration of a user-defined (e.g. OS, compiler) routine. Operating systems use interrupts, signals, and traps to notify kernel and user-level software programs about I/O events from the disk, network, and audio/video devices as well as errors related to the circuit board, thermal components, out-of-bound references to arrays or pointers, bad memory addresses such as a null pointer, stack faults, mis-aligned memory, arithmetic overflow from integer and floating point units, and divide by zero. The default exception handling behavior of most language compilers is to search and unwind the stack of functions until a suitable exception handler is found to execute; if no exception handler is found, then the program is terminated with the appropriate OS error code. Modern programming languages have offered constructs to and exceptions since LISP did so in the 1970s; these language features are found in Ada, C++, Java, Python, and Smalltalk that were all available at the time that the SMCS was developed by Canadian Aviation Electronics (CAE). CAE is a technology provider of simulators, control systems, and training services to the aerospace and defense industries, earned more than $2.7 billion CAD of revenue in 2017, and is publicly traded on the TSX and NYSE stock markets. Again, had CAE used a modern programming language with exception handling to develop the RDM system, then perhaps the ship’s SMCS would have reliably dealt with the divide-by-zero error and not crashed. handle exceptions throw catch Software system components should be as reasonably effective as possible. The amongst Smart Ship components meant that an active fault in a foundational one such as the SMCS could result in failure for all. Comparing the Yorktown’s fragility to the more robust arithmetic of a $2.95 pocket calculator that could survive a divide-by-zero error, DiGiorgio expressed surprise “that the computers on the Yorktown were not designed to tolerate such a simple error” and “that there is very little segregation of error when software shares bad data”. Accordingly, one has to balance the decoupling of and of distributed system components with their and cost. One approach might have been to replicate and cache the RDM in a read-only state across the LAN so that the last known safe state would have been available to a local process as a second option in case the primary RDM hosted on the LAN was down; this design improves system reliability, but also could introduce a data consistency problem. Of course, a simpler approach would have been for the RDM to validate the input data and handle exceptions if they occurred. The ship hardware system engineers did have the foresight to include the FFG-7 power units that were able to support the ship’s return to base. Such backup components are essential for eliminating single points of failure and improving reliability in a larger system. fault tolerant dependency graph resilient engineering complexity redundant Another contributing factor to the incident was the to design, construct, install, and test the software. Rushton stated that “we pushed the envelope and knew that events such as what happened… were possible”. DiGiorgio also recommended more upfront engineering in his NPI article writing that “installing a control system on a warship and resolving problems as the project progresses is a costly and naive process.” Nevertheless, one has to weigh the benefit of these activities with their cost. Furthermore, the movement from waterfall processes to more Agile methodologies, earlier prototypes, and smaller iterations suggests that the Navy was balancing caution and progressive experimentation in a pragmatic manner with the year long construction phase mitigated by six months of at-sea testing. The goal of the Smart Ship program was to reduce the operating costs of Navy ships without compromising combat readiness, and one can appreciate the conflict of interests that might have curtailed delivery time. lack of time project management CAE corrected some of the aforementioned SMCS software issues, and the Yorktown underwent further testing after updates to its SMCS, returning to active service over a year later. On 25 September 1999, the ship departed Pascagoula for a four month counter-narcotics deployment in the Caribbean, and it served without problems. The Yorktown’s final mission was patrolling the Persian Gulf from February to August of 2004; the ship assisted with protecting Iraqi oil terminals and conducting other maritime security operations. Approaching the end of its 35-year estimated life cycle, the Yorktown was decommissioned and struck on 10 December 2004; since that time, it has been berthed at the Naval Inactive Ships Maintenance Facility in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but not yet scrapped. On the other hand, the SSPO ambitions and budget faced considerable scrutiny after the Yorktown incident. The original contract awarded to Litton Industries was worth $138.6 million USD, and the program’s scope was installing the Smart Ship System on all 27 CG-47 cruisers. The Smart Ship System was installed on the USS Ticonderoga (CG-47) after taking 70 weeks and costing the company $30 million USD. Contract renegotiations took place, and under the amended agreement, Litton would complete work on two additional ships already started with an option to build four more. Litton engineers were able to install the system on the USS Monterey in 20 weeks, but the costly lessons of complexity and retrofitting new technology on legacy systems meant that the SSPO’s transformation goals would have to await a new generation of Navy ships. Enjoy the article? Follow me on Medium and Twitter for more updates. References https://gcn.com/Articles/1998/07/13/Software-glitches-leave-Navy-Smart-Ship-dead-in-the-water.aspx https://gcn.com/articles/1998/08/31/smart-ship-inquiry-a-go.aspx https://gcn.com/articles/1998/08/03/letters-to-the-editor_633659319144171960.aspx https://gcn.com/Articles/1998/11/09/Navy-Calibration-flaw-crashed-Yorktown-LAN.aspx https://gcn.com/articles/1999/11/04/navy-cruises-on-with-atm.aspx https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1998-06/smart-ship-not-answer-0 https://www.wired.com/1998/07/sunk-by-windows-nt/ https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/yorktown.html#smart1 https://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/print/volume-12/issue-3/news/navy-postmortem-tries-to-pinpoint-what-went-wrong-with-the-smart-ship.html https://www.navysite.de/cg/cg48.html https://www.navysite.de/cg/cg47class.htm#smart

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