Was surprised to learn some years ago that in Brazil the military was responsible for civilian air traffic management. That seemed so wild at the time. Don't know if it's still the case...
Still is the case. But here they take that job very seriously.
I even saw a higher up personally helping once, I was in an open source tech conference, and a colonel was present to show the air force work using Ubuntu and Debian, while chatting with him he got a phone call about a radar issue, he immediately picked up a laptop and started to fire up some domestic made tech and started helping the operators directly.
If the timing wasn't seemly so random I would think they did it on purpose just to show off the cool tech.
I don't know how to reconcile the safety culture of 'telling the truth no matter what' and not blaming, with the chain-of-command, authority and obeying orders sir-yes-sir of the military. I probably have a very warped view of military leaders, but I know which customers ask for the 'safety override' button...
Yes, I see. What I mean is that in civilian systems I designed (or helped design) the focus is on redundancy, safety and personel safety. I've felt for a long time the 'for the military' design was quick to forgo redundancies and failsafes, for better 'performance' (my vocabulary is lacking there, sorry).
The mentality is changing a lot and I'm starting to see safety requirements in contracts and more and more frequent audits from customers on the topic (even though it wasn't in the spirit of things or the contract when system was designed, ugh...) and it's very, very hard to retrofit safety and personel safety in a product line, codebase, system design, and especially in the daily reflexes of systems or sw engineers. Everyone seems to overshoot ("safety says we must do X" - well no it's still an engineering compromise you still have choices and trade-offs - "but safety!" - yes, let's go back to the safety plan, what are the critical elements, what are the failure modes, what are the chances, what is the expected system response?...)
It's particularly tough for those teams that have to swallow the double firehose of safety and "cyber"-security :-D
