Pentagon Withholds Internal Report About Flawed $2.7 Billion Intel Program by Gordon Lubold and Shane Harris, Foreign Policy
The Army has spent years defending a multibillion-dollar intelligence system that critics say costs too much and does too little. A new internal report has found that there's a simple, relatively inexpensive program that could handle many of the same jobs at a fraction of the cost. For the past eight months, though, the Pentagon has kept the report hidden away.
Members of Congress have been asking Defense Department officials to send them the assessment, a copy of which was obtained by Foreign Policy, but the Pentagon has yet to do so. At issue is the Army's Distributed Common Ground System, expected to cost nearly $11 billion over 30 years and built by a consortium of major Beltway contractors, including Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics…
Watchdog: US May be Paying Salaries of ‘Ghost’ Afghan Policemen by John Harper, Stars and Stripes
American taxpayers may be the victims of a ‘ghost worker’ scheme in Afghanistan, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, an independent watchdog group created by Congress.
“The U.S. may be unwittingly helping to pay the salaries of nonexistent members of the Afghan National Police,” John Sopko, the head of SIGAR, wrote in a Feb. 19 letter to commanders of Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, which manages the majority of donated funds intended for the Afghan National Security Forces…
Comments
Reference DCGS-A---a total waste and it has been in the works for how long (I was around it for over eight years and it still was not fully operational)and is still not fully operational.
First saw it in 2005/2006 and everwhere it was functioning it had a defense contracting team of coders just to keep it running and that is the core problem.
They have never stopped coding work as that is the cash cow for their product--it never has fulfilled what the contractors said it would in the timeframe they said it would be up and fully operational and who pays the Force and the taxpayers.
DCSG-A will never be fully operational and never fulfill even what the initial sales presentation said it would back in 2006---it has and is just a cash cow for defense contractors who by the way also sold the Army on another intel tool prior to DCGS-A that was both costly, poorly developed and while deployed never really used by the Force-- which was also another cash cow.
Reference Palantir---a great product that came in the backdoor for initially network analysis.
True problem with Palantir is that they could have vastly expanded the take up by the Army and other DoD organizations but they would never come off of their single copy and rather expensive sales pricing due to their 90 day earnings cycle for tech companies that indicates just how profitable they are.
If they had gone to a DoD wide licensing scheme with a truly reasonable pricing model the tool was have been purchased and pushed DoD wide---but they did not so it was a conquer this organization, then maybe that one and then a few copies here or there---they were never fully able to break across the entire DoD and it was due to pricing.