Department of Defense Computer Technology (Study Annex). A Report to Congress.

This report addresses concerns of the Congress expressed in the Authorization and Appropriations Acts of 1983 and 1984 regarding the Departments plans for the management of mission-critical computer resources. The Congress requested the Department to address acceleration of the Ada language, advanced microelectronic and chip set computers, instruction set architecture, the reduction of unproductive proliferation of different types of military computers, schedules for current computer programs, and the plan for the software technology STARS program. The Departments Ada policy and plans are provided in Section I of this report, as is an Introduction to the STARS Program. The detailed strategy for STARS will be forwarded to the Congress in February 1984. The Departments strategy covering the use of advanced microelectronic and chip set computers in weapons systems is presented in Section II, however, specific program segments that effect this strategy are included in each section of the report. A revised approach to instruction set architecture has been developed. It is detailed in Section III in the larger context of computer system interfaces. Plans for current generation military computer programs are contained in Section IV. Finally, a plan for next-generation mission-critical computers is presented in Section V.