Top General: Defense Department IT In "Stone Age" 155
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.'"
Former Marine (Score:5, Interesting)
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
My time in the Navy on an FFG (Score:4, Interesting)
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.