Army of Davids Beats Pentagon Procurement

chris-chittleborough writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that 'a Marine officer in Iraq, a small network-design company in California, a nonprofit troop-support group, a blogger and other undeterrable folk designed a handheld insurgent-identification device, built it, shipped it and deployed it in [Iraq] in 30 days.' Compare this to the Automated Biometric Identification System, a multi-megabuck Pentagon project now 2 years old. With bureaucracy increasingly strangling innovation, will agile smaller businesses be able to accomplish what once required a sprawling government project?"

Comments

This is the entire problem with "cheap combat"

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Something tells me that if we drafted the appropriate industries to build a *REAL* military industrial complex, and punished profiteering adequately in the first place, our troops could have had this technology (instead of a stupid deck of playing cards) in 2002, instead of waiting until 2007 for it to be delivered. But since Bush doesn't want to impact the profitability of this war, we have to wait for a significantly patriotic David to identify who the enemy is. It's exactly this lack of vision that has turned Afghanistan back into a Taliban-controlled country and destroyed our success in Iraq.

Just try cutting off the gravy train...

[greg_barton]

The moment you try to limit funding to a wasteful Pentagon program you're accused of hating the troops.

And so it goes.

The standard rip against wasteful education spending is, "You can't just throw money at a problem and expect it to be fixed!"

Yet that's done 10x with the military and no one bats an eye.

Re:Apples & Oranges?

[bluekanoodle]

Take the google example to extreme, build the system of out cogs, and when a cog breaks replace it. Granted some things need to be military spec, but these devices are being used in a law enforcement style capacity, not a chugging through the brush for 20 days role. Just like the police style equipment this is modeled from, the users of the system are never more then a couple of hours aways from the base of operations that a replacement part can't be substituted. whats important is to ensure the units are interchangeable and that you keep sufficient stock on hand.

In any case, having something like this that has not had extensive field trials is better then what they had before, which was nothing. The problem with the military procurement system, is that everything has to go thrugh the same process, regardless of whether its a 200 handheld unit, or a 1 million dollar vehicle. This does not allow the agility that the private sector can afford.