Until June 2019, the system sending launch orders to US nuclear forces ran on 8-inch floppy disks; the Air Force kept them partly because they could not be hacked online

You know those little gray squares you click in Word to save a document? That icon is a relic of the 8-inch and 3.5-inch floppy disks that most millennials have only ever seen as a save-button icon; the physical disks themselves went obsolete in consumer computing well before most millennials were born, let alone using computers. Now imagine that same technology residing in a system that distributes emergency orders to America's nuclear forces. According to a 2019 DefenseNews publication by reporter Valerie Insinna, the Air Force's Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) moved off its 8-inch floppy disks to a solid-state storage system in June of 2019. Insinna notes the 8-inch floppy disks are familiar to many after the 2014 "60 Minutes" segment, which highlighted the system that could receive a presidential order to fire missiles from silos around the country. With the headline already being the removal of the floppies, the more interesting question is why such a thing could persist, and what that might say about the US's self-governance in the digital space, not to mention the irony.

Old tech has defenders, and they have a point

DefenseNews quotes Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, who commands the Air Force squadron that maintains SACCS, arguing that "You can't hack something that doesn't have an IP address," in an October interview. It's a fair argument, as a machine that isn't accessible on the internet is less vulnerable to things like viruses and Trojans. But that's the argument of one man, and it only addresses half the issue. The rest of the article highlights the age of the tech, with stories of the system using hardware from the 1970s, far from the height of cybersecurity.

As per DefenseNews’ reporting, many of the younger airmen who worked with SACCS had been trained for more modern IT work, and not to do soldering at the circuit board level. The Air Force uses civilian technicians for component-level repair, and Rossi stated that it was particularly challenging to find such expertise. The publication also notes that the program's software is often updated by young Air Force programmers. While SACCS as a whole wasn't some sort of amber-encased relic from the dawn of computing, its continued usefulness was due in part to a dedication to keep it moving in step with modern systems. This practice was unsustainable, and as the required expertise dwindled, so did the motivation to continue.

A floppy disk crisis is really just a federal budget crisis

SACCS was far from alone in this, as documented in the Government Accountability Office's 2016 report on aging federal systems, which found the Department of Defense using 8-inch floppy disks in a system that controlled the day-to-day operations of the nation's nuclear forces. That same report determined that the federal government spent approximately 75 percent of its 2015 fiscal year IT budget on operations and maintenance rather than on new systems purchases.

Nine years later, the pattern hasn't gone away

A 2025 GAO report on federal IT modernization contains two separate counts that shouldn't be confused for each other. First, GAO revisited the 10 critical legacy systems it had originally flagged back in 2019 and found that, as of February 2025, agencies had fully modernized only 3 of those original 10. Separately, for this new report GAO also ran a fresh, expanded review of 69 legacy systems across the government and used it to compile an updated ranking of the 11 systems now considered most in need of modernization, maintained by 10 federal agencies. The report also found that the government spends over $100 billion a year on information technology, the vast majority of which goes to operation and maintenance rather than new systems purchases.

The same report determined that only three agencies had produced documented modernization strategies that covered all the areas GAO recommended. These aging systems were expensive to maintain, and several were flagged with known cybersecurity vulnerabilities of their own, and while that doesn't completely dismiss Rossi's point about SACCS specifically being unreachable over a network, it does add to the negative implications of slow modernization government-wide, since most other legacy systems on the list, unlike SACCS, are connected to networks and remain exposed to the kind of remote attacks SACCS's isolation was designed to prevent.

What we should take from this

The floppy disks themselves weren't the scandal. While modern replacements often bring new problems to a system, older technology has had its fair share as well, and the longer such systems are maintained, the more opportunity there is for errors or omissions to creep in. The real issue is that systems critical to running the government continue to rely on older technology that requires specialized maintenance, and that the expertise to maintain such systems becomes harder to find as time passes. It also reflects a pattern in federal technology spending, where routine upkeep of aging systems consistently outweighs investment in replacing them, leaving some of those systems exposed to risk in the meantime.