Army Leaders Defend Flawed Intelligence System
Army Leaders Defend Flawed Intelligence System by Ken Dilanian, Associated Press
Gen. John Campbell, the army's vice chief of staff and nominee to lead U.S. forces in Afghanistan, cited his son's experiences as a soldier there to answer a senator's tough questions last year about a troubled intelligence technology system.
But after an inquiry from The Associated Press, the Army acknowledged this week that Campbell misspoke. He also omitted key facts as he sought to defend a $4 billion system that critics say has not worked as promised. Campbell will likely face more questions about the intelligence system at his confirmation hearing on Thursday. If confirmed, he heads to Afghanistan, where gathering and making sense of intelligence will remain a priority even as U.S. troops draw down…
Is now a good time to look at radically restructuring the US Army procurement system by doing away with the current method and making it SOP to let Soldiers out in units identify and recommend off-the-shelf products instead (this might be cheaper too)? It seems that any procurement project run by the Army (DoD?) tends to be very slow, inflexible, and unresponsive to actual unit needs. If units in a combat zone requested a particular system that they knew to be functional compared to the Army-fielded one that sucked and didn’t work, purchasing & fielding the former seems like a no-brainer. Didn’t the MRAP fielding suffer from this sort of ponderousness?
Check the defense contractor behind DCGS-A namely Textron—check then the system they fielded for the tactical intelligence collectors in 2004/2005 which was never used by the field as it never worked either.
They just used the laptop for other things as they needed laptops.
In 2004 we heard of the DCGS fielding and then in 2006 when I bumped into it at the NTC through to 2010 it never worked as stated it would by the defense contractor.
They had to maintain a team of coders and developers just to fix the bugs and try to get it to work.
So why has no one asked Textron to repay the American taxpayers?
By the way the solution it was trying to achieve can never be realized—ever try tying 29 different databases together that never were designed to speak to each other in the first place due to security requirements?
Now there is the “intel cloud” project that is being lead by the same group of defense contractors that fielded DCGS.
And we all know just how secure “data clouds” are—just ask the Chinese or Russian hackers.