Another of those untold stories of the Gulf War has just come our way, and given the way Japanese companies winced and said we don’t like to think about that when it was suggested that many of their components were used in the weapon systems that inflicted the Mother of all Routs, it’s understandable that it has not been widely publicised: the US Army’s central logistics, command and control software is written for the IBM Corp 370 environment, but IBM’s touching, loyal and long-standing allegiance to the humble trade of the plumber meant that there isn’t an IBM mainframe big enough to take care of a battle with pretensions of Motherhood that doesn’t require water cooling; the militia decided that the paraphenalia associated with water chilling and heat exchanging would be unacceptably vulnerable to any passing missile looking for somewhere to Scud, so Hitachi Ltd was asked to ship one of its top-end air-cooled machines to a secret location understood to be in Texas, whence it was transported to the desert kingdom, and so it was that Japan Inc played an indispensible role in the planning and conduct of the war.
