The U.S. Army describes its Future Combat Systems program as a “cohesive system-of-systems” comprised of software, networks, and hardware (as in next-generation tanks) that will allow the future soldier “to see first, understand first, act first, and finish decisively.”

Not long after Boeing was named a lead system integrator on the program in 2004, the company joined something called the Transglobal Secure Collaboration Program, or the TSCP. And so it entered a whole new realm of IT control.