The White House’s pick to lead the Pentagon’s weapons testing wants “automation everywhere.” That’s because the complexity of new weapons is mostly in software, Amy Henninger said at her Thursday confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The systems to be tested “are software-enabled and software-defined and there's only five to 10 percent that is only hardware,” she said. “I would suggest that using more software to automate software testing is where we need to go.”

But it won’t replace live testing, Henninger vowed. “It makes sense to model or simulate the things that we know and live test the things that we don't know. And with that as a baseline heuristic, I don't ever foresee a day where we will have no live testing.” Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams r

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