When he said &quot;at a small base outside of the Hanscom U.S. Air Force Base&quot; I took his responsibility to be that of one of these two bases (or perhaps the AOC if that was elsewhere). I&#x27;d agree that it seems unreasonable for a single person to have such responsibility, even for their &#x27;ground&#x27; software. Operational battle management software would also probably come from a different place than the payroll systems, for example. The software in the various air platforms would likely come from each platform&#x27;s development programme.<p>In the UK and Canadian military, there is no single overall software person, although there are technical authorities who define standards, etc, that should be used when software is developed.<p>FWIW, the UK Ministry of Defence actively supports the use of Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) software. This isn&#x27;t always OSS, but is at least better than building everything from scratch. A good ongoing example is the use of &#x27;serious games&#x27; to support military training, e.g. as image generators inside simulators or as standalone desktop training packages. There are various COTS packages that fulfill both of these and other roles.<p>[EDIT: Typo]