Almost all of DoD's 2,107 mission-critical computer systems have been tested for the Y2K bug and fixed, Secretary of Defense William Cohen said Thursday at a press briefing.
The agency's other 4,749 non-mission critical systems are 94 percent Y2K-compliant. DoD will fix all mission-critical systems before the new year, Cohen said.
"With six months to go before the turn of the year, we can rest assured the Defense Department will be well-positioned to handle its national security responsibilities before, on and after January 1, 2000," Cohen said.
Cohen said DoD has prepared for the Y2K crisis like it would for an enemy attack, with detailed testing and contingency plans. And, apparently, a lot of money. The Defense Department will spend $3.7 billion on Y2K remediation through March 2000, a Pentagon official said.
Last week, DoD finished its largest-ever testing effort, conducting end-to-end tests of Defense Logistics Agency systems. DLA processes 28,000 transactions per hour, or roughly one per second. Only one problem turned up in the test of 200 million lines of DLA computer code, Cohen said, and that failure has already been fixed.
DoD has also been preparing for international Y2K-related crises. A special nuclear command center has been set up in Colorado to help soothe fears in the United States and Russia of an accidental nuclear launch. Since the war in Kosovo, however, Russia has deferred participation in the shared early warning center. DoD will continue working on the U.S. end of operations and hopes to have full Russian cooperation by August, Pentagon officials said.
For its part, DoD's strategic nuclear force has conducted five end-to-end tests to evaluate nuclear systems for Y2K compliance and had no failures during any of those tests, said Adm. Richard W. Mies, commander in chief of the U.S. Strategic Command.
"There is no risk of accidental launch," Mies said. "Computers by themselves cannot launch nuclear weapons."