Don’t look too deeply into this unless you’re comfortable discovering that the military and security state is a prolific contributor to many open source projects.
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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SELinux was a product of the NSA. Maybe the best thing that agency has done.
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Greek military uses Linux Mint, so yeah, it's used in some places. I believe the Indian one does too.
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When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source. - Major General Nicholas Justice
as they're robust
I would argue they are just what was used during development. After that, it never changes.
Why did they use it back then? Were there many alternatives? I do not know.
I haven't done any work for the military but i can say that all the legacy systems I've worked on were because the specific software they need was written only for Windows 98 and the developer or company that created it is long gone. Keeping it going is a chore but switching to literally anything else is out of the question.
I could see for military applications that having the known quantity of a working piece of software that isn't changing anymore and can be swapped as an entire unit is an advantage, especially if it doesn't touch the internet in any capacity. But eventually you run out of people who know what to do if any changes need to be made.
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Linux is commonly used in the communications systems, like on invidual radio "stations". Propably used everywhere where high confidentiality and security is required.
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I've heard that the DoD uses RHEL pretty extensively. RHEL in the US Military
That article says that the US military has the largest single install base for RHEL in the world, but that was about 15 years ago, I don't know if that's still true.
Apparently back then the US nuclear sub fleet and its sonar systems also ran on RHEL.
I suspect lots of military hardware runs some form of *Nix or BSD type system. Many embedded systems run some *Nix type OS, and a huge portion of the developed world's weaponry is smart, so it it full of low power embedded systems and custom SoCs.
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