My recent trip to ITSEC really got my blood boiling as you can see from my previous entry, though I always get a little irritable around this time of year.  Through most of the year, my nose is down in the mud, churning out code and dealing with my usual array of managerial duties at work while finding time for my family at home.  It all seems to work fine until the holidays.  I finally take a break from the insanity and lift my head up to see the world and I’m always disappointed.  More death and mayhem on the news, more thoughtless “reality” shows popping up, and more kids driving BMW’s and talking on $400 mobile phones about how hard their life is.  In addition to all of this, ITSEC (taking place just after Thanksgiving) gives me an opportunity to talk with other industry veterans.  This may sound like a great thing, but my blissful ignorance is often washed away by countless stories of political backstabbing and crooked smiles.  I shook a lot of hands at that conference and I heard a lot of pitches and it always bothers me how the ultimate goal; our troops, are the last thing that anyone talks about.  The first topics you will often hear are mentions of technology, features, then cost and development efforts, followed by a sales pitch and a request for my business card.  I had entire conversations that never once said HOW their product would help save a life.  The only thing that mattered was that the government asked for something and a mountain of companies jumped on it, regardless of the fact that it may have been an idea from someone who has no idea what the modern soldier needs.

ITSEC did get me thinking though.  What does the American Soldier of today need that he doesn’t already have available; politics be damned?  I’ve recently started watching a lot of videos; mostly combat scenarios or IED’s caught on tape.  It was hard to know from those videos exactly what I could do to improve their chance of survival.  I can imagine that their situation is much like my own as a programmer; minus the whole part where people shoot at you of course.

Front line Soldiers, in many ways, are the grunts in the long chain of command.  This is not too different from programmers.  As a programmer or software engineer you are part of a team of people who live on the front line of software development.  You understand your own needs because you live in that world from sun up to sun down.  As a programmer however, you tend to run into several brick walls.  Many of these walls are often related to the needs that you have conflicting with the needs that your superiors think you have.  Sometimes they are right and other times they are very wrong.  In some rare cases they are right, even when you think that they are wrong.  Dealing with this is something we software engineers have to do daily and I’d imagine that it is very much the same for a Soldier.  If we ask for more time, they deliver more manpower to us.  If we ask for more manpower, they offer incentives to work harder.  It never seems to be what we want and always amounts to more work than it should in the end. I wonder if our Soldiers feel the same.

Any Soldier in a war is faced with unique scenarios, dangerous situations, and a constant threat from the least likely of places.  It is this daily threat that often breeds new ideas.  I just wish there was a way for those people to speak their mind, and have their true needs met.  I’d like to think that the billions of dollars spent on military support are going to all the right places, but if my little corner in the Simulation and Training department of the government is this twisted, I’d hate to see the big picture.