The End of JWARS

[dmacqueen]

The US Department of Defense has decided to discontinue the development, maintenance, and –use- of JAS (nee JWARS) by year end. JAS is a joint campaign model, (one that represents all the services), consisting of over 1.1 million lines of Smalltalk that has been developed over the last 15 years at a cost to the taxpayers north of $110 million.

The cancellation is political. The services hate and fear JAS, and have been trying to kill it for years. JAS, unlike their pet inhouse
models, is not easy to fiddle to get the results they want. Don’t like the message, kill the messenger.

Joint campaign analysis will now be done using an Air Force model called Storm, which has been made ‘joint’ by bolting $8 million of maritime C++ code onto it. Storm lacks many features JAS already has – WMD, C4ISR, TBMD, logistics, etc. – but it does not do pesky inconvenient things like sink the odd aircraft carrier, so everyone is happy. </rant>

JAS was possible only because of the power, simplicity, and malleability of Smalltalk. Modeling and simulation involves a great
deal of experimentation that often leads to dead ends. But a modeler rarely has to pitch all his code and start over, because he has not nailed his feet to the floor by strewing type information like cluster bombs throughout the code. Maintain the API, modify the Black Box, and move on.

JAS also made extensive use of treating blocks as data in the fact/ rule system we called the knowledgeBase. The kB allowed the user to have JAS reason about, and act on, important campaign events such as achieving air superiority. The kB made JAS act in a more intelligent way than if such events were scripted by time. The users loved it.

Other than that, I have no complaints. I spent 13 fun-filled years doing everything from shooting TBMs with the airborne laser to
dropping sonobuoys from helicopters to protecting the carrier with Nulkas. Interesting, challenging work in Smalltalk. And, I got paid for it!

So, thanks to all of you who have helped me and my fellow jWarriors over the years. And be sure to save those JWARS magnets – they are sure to become collector’s items!

Cheers,

Donald [|]

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