DMS dates. DISA's doing the DMS rollout as fast as possible, but Tom Clarke, the agency's DMS honcho, no longer will give specific dates for the initial operating capability, originally slated for this month. Clarke told the Interceptor that while DISA and Lockheed Martin are "moving ahead to put
DMS dates. DISA's doing the DMS rollout as fast as possible, but Tom Clarke, the agency's DMS honcho, no longer will give specific dates for the initial operating capability, originally slated for this month. Clarke told the Interceptor that while DISA and Lockheed Martin are "moving ahead to put DMS on the ground as fast as we can...I'm not going to get back into shooting for a meaningless date." Clarke added that "obviously [initial operating capability (IOC)] is not going to happen this July."
Clarke called DMS an "event-driven" program, adding that "nothing has slowed down in terms of the process.... We're getting circuits, we're testing, and we have all kinds of activities going in all directions."
DISA will not even divulge its DMS time line to users in the three services, but Clarke did say he would give Emmett Paige Jr., the ASD/C3I, "my best estimate" if asked. Questioned about whether DMS would meet IOC by July 1997, Clarke said that if it did take that long, a different program manager would be around to answer any questions.
Fred Augusti, the DMS pooh-bah for Lockheed Martin Federal, boldly went into territory Clarke would not enter, declaring last week that the company expects all DMS products to be ready for initial operation tests and evaluation by "late summer."
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Fortezza fritz? I'm picking up medium-strength signals from my Fort Bragg antenna site that field tests of DMS during JWID '96 have already started to run into trouble because of the high-bandwidth overhead of the Fortezza encryption. I understand that in early field tests at JWID, Fortezza has slowed down throughput on some battlefield systems to 200 kilobit/sec. Morse code, anyone?
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Dribble those Desktop V digits. That's what the Standard Systems Group in Alabama seems to be doing with the DT V "B" tables stashed on its World Wide Web site - an essential piece of info for users who want to order a PC from Hughes or ZDS by year's end. Last week I spent a frustrating 24 hours trying to access that info, with little success.
During the day, I did manage to connect with Gunter Air Force Base, but throughput was only 1 kilobit/sec through two Internet access paths. I made another attempt around midnight and again at 6:30 a.m. and could not even make a connection to the Gunter host at http://www.ssc.af.mil.
Maybe this is a Fortezza card problem too, but hopefully it will be fixed by this week. The complete address for the DT V page on the Web at Gunter is http://www.ssc.af.mil/ss/ssm/dt_v_contract/dt-v.html. Hughes and ZDS plan to have their own Web sites up and running this week at http://www.hughes-hds.com/ and http://www.zds.com.
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Last gasp of GSBCA. It looks like the Sun Microsystems protest against the Army Workstations contract award to Digital and HP will be one of the last cases heard by GSBCA. Testimony went on all last week, including a scheduled Saturday session. I understand high-end home and auto salesman around the Beltway mourn the passing of GSBCA.
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