The Pentagon’s Defense Contract Audit Agency has come to the conclusion that the computerised accounting systems operated by some 300 defence contractors are so unreliable and misleading – in particular their material requirements planning systems – that their record keeping is impossible to audit, and it is thinking of requiring the industry to return to manual record keeping: despite this manifest lack of faith in the ability of computers to handle matters relating to the government’s money satisfactorily, there are, as far as we are aware, no plans to scale down the key role of real-time computing in the Strategic Defense Initiative.
