Top General: Defense Department IT In "Stone Age"

CWmike writes "U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James 'Hoss' Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was sharply critical Tuesday of the Defense Department's IT systems and said he sees much room for improvement. the department is pretty much in the Stone Age as far as IT is concerned,' Cartwright said. He cited problems with proprietary systems that aren't connected to anything else and are unable to quickly adapt to changing needs. 'We have huge numbers of data links that move data between proprietary platforms — one point to another point,' he said. The most striking example of an IT failure came during the second Gulf War, where Marines and the Army were dispatched in southern Iraq, he said. 'It's crazy, we buy proprietary [and] we don't understand what it is we're buying into,' he said. 'It works great for an application, and then you come to conflict and you spend the rest of your time trying to modify it to actually do what it should do.'"

Comments

I'm sure there is a joke

[Dyinobal]

I'm sure there is a joke in here some where about Marines, Computers and proprietary systems.

Re:Former Marine

[DesScorp]

I spent my time under Clinton and Bush Jr as a 4067. That's a Computer Programmer in the Marine Corps.

Allow me to segue for just a moment, and bitch a little. The fact that you were a programmer in Marines is indicative of the larger problem of mega-growth in government. Why the hell did the Marines have programmers? Why do they still have guys slicing hams in a mess hall, or changing tires on an F/A-18? Why do they HAVE F/A-18's, when you come right down to it? The Marines are supposed to be a small, elite amphibious light infantry force. Marines should have two jobs, period: storming beaches and guarding ships. That's it. The Navy should be doing any other support tasks.

The fact that we have a Marine Corps that's larger than the entire British armed forces illustrates the problem well. All government entities... civilian and military alike... are constantly seeking to grow themselves to the contrary of any real needs, missions, or resources, and at the expense of rivals, if necessary. There's no justification for the Army to have ships (which they do... Air Force does too), or for the Marines to have C-130's and M1 tanks. I'm not just picking on the Marines here, I just think they're an obvious example of my argument: that not only is government too big, it's also crammed full of rivals that are duplicating each other for budget and prestige reasons. This is why we have over a dozen federal law enforcement agencies that are doing much of the same thing.

Look up an excellent essay in Proceedings magazine from 1956, by a man named Lt. Col. Robert Heinl called Special Trust and Confidence". One of his fears was that keeping standing military forces huge was in and of itself a detriment to those forces. I think history has since proven him right. I'd bet that big budget or no, if the government (civilian, military both) wasn't so freaking big, it'd be easier to deal with problems like integrating a unified IT strategy. Heinl was right, bigness really is a problem.