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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.'"
If only we gave the DoD enough cash for stuff like this....
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So you mean ... like it does already? Have you heard of the FAA? Do you realize they have to certify everything that goes into an sort of aircraft bigger than an 'experimental'?
I spent my time under Clinton and Bush Jr as a 4067. That's a Computer Programmer in the Marine Corps. We had pretty solid gear available, decent servers, and a great network. One royal PITA though was the primary personel database was replicated out nightly from Kansas city. So any intra-base changes could take a full 24 hour window to propagate. Additionally, every 6 months we'd get someone new in charge of that database. And by "in charge" I mean a comitee, not a new DBA. And they would be compelled to rename half the tables and columns. Acronyms are good for 6 months, then all field names are typed in full, then we're down to 4 character codes, then into some strange "drop the vowels" campaign. ROYAL PITA.
As if that wasn't bad enough, in 2001 Bush and military leadership privatized the entire 4000 MOS field. 4066 (networkers) and 4067 (programmers) were lat moved to the 0600 MOSs (radio operators and field wiremen, along with some shunting to admin/clerical). So at the point I was heading out, we were going from a situation where Marines could review and make recommendations, to the point where purchasing decisions were almost entirely in the hands of private contractors.
It was removing just another cog in the machine to streamline the federal cash to corporate pockets process as the Foxes are now instructing the farmer on how to build a hen house.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
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 â" one point to another point,' he said.
To me that sounds like military IT is perfectly in tune with modern corporate IT. It sure sounds like every big company (or even smaller ones) I've ever been at.
The problem is what he really wants is the future. What he really needs is a good IT dictator with some vision, and a lot of power to send balky IT people out to the front line. If anyone can iron out the ego issues that keep traditional IT mired in fiefdoms, it should be the military...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Military, Police, Fire departments....
Have this odd mindset when making decisions. Way back I was putting a bid in to to do a financial report in (I think we proposed a basic Crystal report to read off their SQL Database) reports for a fire department. Quick job easy to do... If the project failed no real impact. However the Chief was insist the quality of the the product was of utmost concern because what the do can be the difference between life and death. Then they went with an other company who was willing to make their own reporting system from scratch for a lot more, but they liked it because it was there and custom just for them. And some how this system was better then using an off the shelf system. And being that their jobs are so important they deserve better then off the shelf.
A lot of the mind set is in terms of hardware these groups have a lot of specialized equipment that is better then off the shelf, and non standard. Firetrucks, Police Cars which are highly modified version of standard cars, the military has "Military Grade" for their equipment. So they are use to thinking that their stuff in order to be useful needs to be non-standard and custom.
I am sure we know IT is kinda more broad. That a system designed to process data for 100,000 people either for corporate use or military makes little difference. The difference is if something goes wrong do you get attacked by lawyers from the company or do you get attacked by the lawyers of the military.
The internet is such a hostile place to move your data anyways military grade isn't any different, they just do it in a way that makes it difficult for it to moved to the right spots.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
FTFA:
"If you want to open up the operational flight software in an airplane, think something along the lines of five years and at least $300 million just to open it up and close it, independent of what you want to try to do to improve it," Cartwright said. "We've got to find ways to do that better and more efficiently inside the Department of Defense for sure."
Damned right. Operational flight software on a aircraft is so fundamental, it should be thought of as part of the hardware. 'Opening it up' is akin to redesigning the aircraft. You don't do that outside of the design and manufacturing environment. If you missed something in testing and acceptance, then there is a process for that. It takes 20 years sometimes to deploy new aircraft. You want to fiddle with the software over the weekend?
General Cartwright has NFI what he is asking for. And should be kept away from it. Stick to the desk, General, and the troops, and leave the engineering to the engineers.
Sheesh. A fair argument for not giving them more.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This is what you get when government bureaucrats are bribed and bidders take the rest of platforms that are needed. Surprise, since I.T. in these departments have no say in the purchases all hell breaks loose and the government wonders why hundreds of billions of dollars are missing. Meanwhile the corrupt companies use that money earned to buy off more politicians to write laws stating to buy their products at inflated prices where you and I pay for them in our taxes. Lovely ... anyone in the private sector knows what I am talking about too with this. Specifically when a CEO has lunch with his buddy at Crapware Inc, which sells a product that you need to support that only works with Windows Vista update 23303 on May 12th 2009 ... on a tuesday, in addition to another product that Crapware Inc. sells, that only works with IE 6 in Windows XP with Java 1.3.1, not 1.3.2 or 1.3.0, which all of course has to communicate together. More fun and joy and of course it is all your fault and not the CEO if it is expensive and can't work together you are the computer guy right?
The difference is in government all software and hardware is done this way and not just for some dumb executive's decision one time. Maybe if the pentagon had a CIO who made these decisions instead they could standardize on a platform so they can talk to each other.
http://saveie6.com/
When your process is so complex that procurement types have to go to classes just to understand it and has so many rules that no one really understands it you get a system that heavily favors companies that understand the rules better than the people running the system. They know exactly what to do to meet the letter of the law and how to protest if they lose a bid so inmany cases the government is at their mercy. Combine that with a contracting officer's fear of even accidentally violating the rules and winding up in trouble and you have a system that always goes the "safe" route
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
what do you really expect when you whore out every project to the (random) lowest bidder?
I enlisted under what the navy calls Advanced Electronics Computer Field. I expected to actually, ya know, work on advanced electronics or computers. Was I in for a shock. Instead, I wasted my early and mid 20's working on 1970's era comm gear. The computer I spent the most time on was the UYK-20 which actually had a PAPER TAPE as the primary method of input. I actually envisioned working on modern equipment. The newest piece of gear I got to work on was the R-2368 receiver.
God I wish I could sue the navy for false advertising. Fuck them.
I worked for the Marine Corps Systems Command (Quantico, VA) and tried mightily to move the Corps to inexpensive open systems and protocols. I don't know where General Cartwright was at the time, but the Marine Corps leadership did not look kindly on my attempts to implement solutions to the problems the General states exist. The General was quoted as saying "... we buy proprietary [and] we don't understand what it is we're buying into," My direct experience says this not a true statement. The Marine Corps understands to the highest degree that they are buying proprietary, closed, expensive systems. That's precisely what they specified, so that's exactly what they get. If anyone in this forum thinks that the Marine Corps leadership lacked sage advice or that nobody was willing to put their career on the line to get the leadership on the right path, you are mistaken.
I'm all for smaller is better, but turning 50 government people to 50 contractors really doesn't make government smaller.
I don't want jobs simply turned over to contractors... I don't want any military duties turned over to contractors at all. My point, more directly would be "why is a Marine doing a job that a sailor should be doing"? Traditionally, the Navy provided whatever support Marines needed. But in today's environment, the Marines get their own programmers, cooks, accountants, etc, simply so they can be more "independent" from the Navy. But they were never supposed to be independent from the Navy. They're Marines, after all.
That kind of "He's got it so I want it too" attitude is a huge reason for that growth in government.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
And yet they have more stringent certification requirements. US Military aircraft are some of the safest, most well maintained in the world.
I currently work as an Air Force civilian and the biggest single problem is the crazy accreditation process. We would LOVE to use the best and newest open source programs and utilities to do our jobs but we are stuck using technology from 5-6 years ago because the accreditation process was intentionally created by contractors to be as complex as possible so that only they were qualified to get anything approved. (Job security anyone?) Got a great new product that would save 1,000 lives and countless millions? It *might* be fast tracked and only take 2 years to get approved.... The system IS a mess and our adversaries don't have to deal with it - they can use the best equipment and software immediately....
The hidden military is ran by the most top notch scientists in the world working on back engineering technology either not from earth, or hidden technology on each that was discovered using our tax dollars (but we don't get to see anything from this research, it trickles down over the years)
You're kidding, right? While the idea that the government has a UFO from Roswell sounds cool and like a great movie plot, if they really had been reverse-engineering UFO technology, don't you think we'd have seen some more concrete results of that work by now, especially after all these decades? What modern technology can you possibly point to that was from UFOs, rather than something obviously invented by humans with no outside help?
Some people like to argue that our rate of technological progress is obvious evidence of such a "conspiracy" (though a positive one, rather than your typical negative one). But mankind has had a very high rate of technological progress ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution, way before anyone was talking about UFOs. Just look at the changes in technology between 1900 and 1945: airplanes invented, jet engines/airplanes invented, radio, radar, the list goes on and on. In fact, many tech areas have been progressing much more slowly in the last 50 years, namely aviation. Except for lower cost, crappy or absent meals, and much smaller seating space, and of course getting irradiated or molested at the airport, there's little difference between flying a commercial plane from NY to London now versus 30 years ago. In fact, it was probably a shorter trip back then, as they're more worried about fuel economy now. The biggest change is probably that the airplane now has GPS navigation, and some fancy-looking glass-panel displays.
"Hoss" could do something right away - scuttle the "upgrade" to Vista and go straight to Win7. I know, I know, the whole business of using MS in the government is insane, but it would be nice to get to spend less by avoinding some of the criminal insanity,