“Admiral Meng, before our demonstration, I’d like to recount a story,” Krieger said. “It is a story you are no doubt familiar with, but it will take us to a place from which we might all become raptors. In 1996, the US Navy announced it would develop a new, technologically superior battleship designed to ensure American naval dominance into the twenty-first century. It called the program Smart Ship. Instead of reconceiving the idea of a warship, however, the Navy hired Griffon Industries to backfit an old one. Griffon retrofitted the Yorktown with a new bridge, automated her navigation and propulsion systems, fused her SAMs and torpedoes to operate in sync with Aegis. To make it all work, Griffon laid four miles of cable and fiber optics through the ship, then they installed twenty-seven desktop PCs and ran the ship’s entire system on Microsoft Windows. Let me repeat that: the American Navy ran the most technologically sophisticated warship in history on the same business software used by my children’s school.

“A week after her relaunch, Yorktown was off the coast of Nicaragua in pursuit of a Colombian drug trafficker when the entire ship lost power. Every system down, Yorkie dead in the water, humiliated, towed to port. Unfortunately for the Navy, a reporter from the news program 60 Minutes was on board that day, filming a story about America’s drug war. The most advanced warship in history went dark on national television. Millions of Americans saw the American Navy fail. I’m sure you saw it, too.”

Meng nodded, though Mapes had only begun to translate. Krieger waited for her to finish.

“What caused the failure?” Krieger asked rhetorically. He held up his thumb and forefinger in the shape of an okay sign. “Zero,” he said. “Officially, the Navy said the ship went dark as part of a covert maneuver. The truth was a systems tech accidentally typed a zero into a database field calling for a denominator. You cannot divide a number by zero, but instead of issuing a warning, the ship’s entire operating system crashed. And America’s Smart Ship program sank with it.”

He looked at Meng. “The greatest threat any military can face is doubt. It took ten years for the Navy to risk automating its ships again. Smart Ship Two, they called their next attempt. Perseus Group bid on it. We proposed a fully automated, virtually unmanned naval capability using smaller, more agile platforms—a computer that happens to float and shoot. We were not successful. The Pentagon and our Congress think Big War, and our idea made things small. Instead of reconceiving battle, they green-lighted another retrofit.”

Again, Meng nodded. He knew all this, as well.