The US Air Force has been fighting an increasingly futile battle to update its inventory control systems. Despite periodic studies and reviews pointing out that their 30 year old mainframe based setup is not only getting obsolete, but increasingly ineffective, there has been little success in getting new systems in place. The current effort to get off the inefficient mainframe system tries to shift the inventory operation to a web based network. The air force has 20,000 organizations that use the SBSS (Standard Base Supply System). The big fear has always been that cutting over to a new system would, as is often the case with large government projects, be botched and leave the air force with serious resupply problems for many months. But the expense and difficulty of keeping the 30 year old SBSS software going makes the risk acceptable.