Intercepts

Pax DISN. AT&T has pulled off the platoons of guerrilla-style lobbyists who have fought a rear-guard action on Capitol Hill for months against DISA's planned DISN architecture. The Interceptor is picking up strong signals from his K Street antenna site that Harry Goodall, the new AT&T defense veep, has decided to stop lobbying and start preparing bids. How novel.

I hear the lobbyists are being retrained to be peddlers for AT&T residential long-distance service and soon will start pestering DISN PM Col. Marlin Forbes at home with True Rewards offers.

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Air Force turf tussles. The Interceptor also is picking up much scuttlebutt from the Pentagon's fourth and fifth floors about yet another reorganization of communications and computer management, with some folks saying that much of the C2 division headed by Lt. Gen. John Fairfield may move back to the SAF acquisition mini-secretariat headed by the aptly named Art Money. This scenario calls for Fairfield's plans-and-policy shop to go to a new planning directorate.

Other folks say that since Fairfield has an inside track with chief of staff Ronald Fogelman, he stands to come out a winner in any turf battle.

Meanwhile, I'm picking up hints that the Air Force CIO - yet to be named - will be buried deep inside Money's shop, lacking real clout.

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DMS wars (continued). Enterprise Solutions Ltd., the Mac and Unix e-mail contractor for DMS - as well as the supplier of X.500 directories and message transfer agents for DMS - says the battle between Lotus and Microsoft obscures the solution it offers to DOD users. Holly Forsberg, an ESL image therapist, points out that her company offers an open solution, while MS and Lotus provide "proprietary solutions with the intention of locking customers in." Round Three, anyone?

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Dollars for Y2K. So far no one on the Hill has decided to appropriate the billions of dollars needed to fix the Y2K problem, preferring to let agencies take it out of their hides. But a small Herndon, Va., company, Template Software, hit it big in the Senate DOD appropriations bill, according to my Y2K advisory panel. The Senate DOD bill provides $5 million for benchmarking "template infrastructures and libraries of proven, object-oriented code to quickly and reliably produce replacement application products" for software riddled with bad date fields.

I'm told Template, a company with $10 million in annual revenues that is headed by Joseph Fox and Linwood Pearce, is the only outfit with products that fit this bill. Maybe AT&T should hire their lobbyists.

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SSG Web snafu. The Standard Systems Group managed to goose up its Internet connections early last week so the thousands of folks wanting to download DT V contract information from a Web server could do so at a speed faster than 300 bit/sec. But according to an e-mail received here at Intercept Central, getting out of Gunter on a daily basis on the Internet is an even worse problem than getting in. A disgruntled Gunterite told me that a 9,600 bit/sec dial-up modem provides him better faster service than the on-base LAN.