Integrated bridges are being installed all across USN ships, including Mt. Whitney with MSC right now. They're filled with a hodgepodge of HMIs that are all linked to a control system filled with gyros, ECDIS, RADAR, propulsion, etc. etc. System integration is complex and the design work is done by contracted companies. You don't have the first party vendor doing the integration work. It's a recipe for disaster.
> You don't have the first party vendor doing the integration work.
The only reason this should be true is if the Navy is directly providing this service instead. If nobody is coordinating integration, then that's absolute insanity. Integration is the most important job in a distributed system like this, also probably the hardest.
Knowing the military they probably thought they could avoid needing an integrator by writing out tens of thousands of pages of specs, never stopping to consider that the specs themselves may be incorrect or unworkable or that they would be so complex that no vendor could ever deliver a product that exactly meets the specs.
This is pretty typical of military contracts. They like to spread the work around, so different vendors provide different pieces of the system, and it ends up being a hodgepodge that doesn't integrate well and doesn't work well.
