[bootsup]

Last I was paying attention, all the legacy aircraft carriers hadn't been upgraded from windows xp, and had no upgrade path. That's only one of the platform's many vulnerabilities. Their purpose seems to have more to do with capital extraction than warfighting.

[buran77]

I was mostly thinking of the physical design of the ships (and their operation) as brought up by OP and GP. But even when it comes to IT, I can understand having a hard time fully validating a new OS on those ships. And still they take much better measures for securing those carriers overall than your average supermarket with XP cash registers.

The point, as I said below, is that the framework under which the military operate does a far better job at forcing the people to more consistently adhere to stricter rules. Which means under similar circumstances there's a good chance the military can keep a system safer than most companies.