Pentagon officials, while delighted with the gulf-war performance of weapons like the F-18 Hornet and the Tomahawk cruise missile, have privately concluded that some other important systems were maddeningly unreliable. Secret Navy memos disclose that shipboard communications computers, the key link to General Norman Schwarzkopf's headquarters, were dangerously slow and out of date. Crucial orders from Riyadh were transmitted to some naval vessels at pokey telex speed, often arriving in more than 20 separate pieces and taking up to six hours to be completed. (Personal computers found in many homes can transmit data 10 to 20 times as fast.) The delays...
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