Slashdot Mirror
The Pentagon's Seven Million Lines of Cobol
MrMetlHed writes "A portion of this Reuters article about the Pentagon's inability to manage paying soldiers properly mentions that their payroll program has 'seven million lines of Cobol code that hasn't been updated.' It goes on to mention that the documentation has been lost, and no one really knows how to update it well. In trying to replace the program, the Pentagon spent a billion dollars and wasn't successful."
Army in the 90's
Everyone's pay gets screwed up at least once, then. Uncle Sam takes it back
Mostly minor things like an allowance like jump pay being paid while not on jump status
I'm not sure where you got your numbers from, but you may have a couple of items swapped.
In 2012, the US federal government spent $3.56 trillion dollars, with revenues of $2.44 trillion, and a deficit of $1.12 trillion.
Entitlement spending was 61.9%, and defense spending was 18.7% (~ $677 billion).
You can find that data here: Federal Spending by the Numbers - 2012
You can see the long term trend of defense versus entitlement spending here.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
You are correct. And wrong. According to the Reuters article, there were more than 15,000 requirements changes during the lifetime of the project. So you had precisely the right idea. You just underestimated the ability of a bureaucracy to fight back. By an order of magnitude.
And that's what it was, too. Make no mistake, the project failed because a successful software system would reduce the headcount of the DFAS dramatically. That couldn't be allowed to happen, so it was sabotaged by eternal feature creep.
And of course, they started with PeopleSoft, and there's no organization better at absorbing all available money for no return besides the DOD itself. Talk about a match made in hell...