When Raj Shah was an F-16 pilot in 2006 flying missions along the Iraq-Iran border, he discovered that the multimillion-dollar fighter’s navigation system was so out of date that it couldn’t tell him which side of the border he was flying over. He decided to load his hand-held, $300 Compaq iPAQ with civilian GPS software and digital maps. It worked perfectly.
Ten years later, when Mr. Shah visited the U.S. Air Force command center in Qatar as a civilian, the same tech gap was evident: To his dismay, he saw computers armed with software programs that were older than the military officers using them.
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