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US Army Spent $2.7 Billion On Crashing Computer
An anonymous reader writes "According to two former US Army intelligence officers, the multi-billion-dollar DCGS-A military computer system that was designed to help the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan simply doesn't work. DCGS-A is meant to accrue intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and provide real-time battlefield analysis and the current location of high-value targets — but instead, it has hindered the war effort rather than helped. Major General Michael Flynn, the top intelligence officer in Afghanistan, says that DCGS-A's faults have even resulted in a loss of lives (PDF)."
T.E. Lawrence and the Mind of an Insurgent
"Lawrence distilled six fundamental principles of insurgency that even today have remarkable relevance.
First, a successful guerrilla movement must have an unassailable base - a base secure not only from direct physical assault, but from attack in other forms as well, including psychological attack.
Second, the guerrilla must have a technologically sophisticated enemy. The greater this sophistication, the greater this alien force would rely on forms of communications and logistics that must necessarily present vulnerabilities to the irregular.
Third, the enemy must be sufficiently weak in numbers so as to be unable to occupy the disputed territory in depth with a system of interlocking fortified posts.
Fourth, the guerrilla must have at least the passive support of the populace, if not its full involvement. By Lawrence's calculation, 'Rebellions can be made by 2 percent active in striking force and 98 percent passively sympathetic.'
Fifth, the irregular force must have the fundamental qualities of speed, endurance, presence and logistical independence.
Sixth, the irregular must be sufficiently advanced in weaponry to strike at the enemy's logistics and signals vulnerabilities."
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3723/is_200507/ai_n14685818
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In the words of Scotty, Star Trek III: "The more you overtake the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the drain."
The complexity of modern armies is their Achilles heel.
RTFA and comments on it. Apparently, the linked article is a pro-Palantir marketing gimmick.
The Pentagon does not write its own budget. Our military is civilian led, which means the place to point fingers is at the Senate Defense Appropriations committee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Appropriations_Subcommittee_on_Defense
Note the list of Republicans: all of them are 00's-style big spenders, and perfect complements to their democratic counterparts. There is not a single voice on that committee for fiscal conservatism or budgetary restraint.
I agree that we need to slash and gut the military budget. We can run a better, cheaper army, but first we have to gut the appropriations committee (and the Senate Armed Forces committee). For my part, I have supported primary challengers to ever Republican on that list (to little effect). I urge democrats to do the same.
That was horse-shit fantasy from day one ... did you really believe that Iraq was going to pay you for the troubles of overthrowing their government, and that they'd be beholden to you and sell you cheap oil for decades?
That was one of those purely bullshit things the previous administration was prone to saying (like "Mission Accomplished") that was so far detached from reality as to be offensive. Oh, sure, they'll give you billions of dollars in oil to offset your costs, and they might throw in a pony as well.
I find it hard to believe that anybody actually believed that the upshot of overthrowing Iraq would be cheap oil -- unless, of course, the whole invasion really was a pretext to try to grab the oil. Mostly, it's just another example of how Bush et al had their heads up their collective asses.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Lotus Notes is what you give to the enemy, for free.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I used to work for one of the suppliers (the one most "at fault" according to the article, with the shitty code and shitty UI we provided).
Here are some things to consider:
The company's business model was to procure IDIQ contracts...they succeeded for several years by purposefully providing broken bits and pieces, in order to assure that more fixes would be purchased later. It finally caught up to them because you can only pile so much crap on existing crap before the whole thing breaks.
Palantir is great software, but people in the Army don't like it. They think it's pretty with no functionality. They are wrong. It's awesome. There are two problems with Palantir, in that you have to store your data on THEIR servers, and the owner of the company is not a US Citizen. They have some inroads, like the links suggest, but they'll never be able to get the most sensitive contracts because of the US Persons requirement.
DCGS-A sucks because it is closed-source garbage that runs only on Microsoft components, and relies heavily on SQL-server. Plus all the people I used to work with are overpaid self-taught jackasses who got the job because they could code in visual basic and they had a clearance.
In all, I'm glad to see the Army and military in general understand and accept that they are suckers and slaves to politicians and "the free market" mentality of PACs and lobbyists. Too bad this garbage (and even bigger garbage FCS/BCTM that finally got axed last month) wasted so much money in the meantime.
Screw the free market. Time to put all this money into government R&D and churn out some decent software for the investment. The NSA alone has enough talented programmers to make this happen.
Read the PDF before you read the article and it's absolutely impossible to come to the same conclusions that the article did, especially the DCGS-A responsible for lives lost part. All he's doing is requesting new analytic tools and the only time he mentions DCGS-A is when he requests that the analytic tools be able to interface with that system. This is clearly a fluff piece for Palantir and with the amount of money they throw around for congressmen, advertising and track suits so their developers look super hip, it's not surprising.