Intercepts

* Room at the top? The Interceptor is picking up medium-strength signals that no matter the outcome of the election top Pentagon management plans to hit the road by the end of the year. This includes Defense Secretary William Perry and Paul Kaminski the technology and acquisition czar. Also expected to clear out is Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall.

John Deutch who left the Pentagon to run the CIA really aches to come back as top gun according to scuttlebutt heard everywhere from the South Parking entrance to Time mag. I also am picking up bizarre but clear signals that Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick really wants to be the first female director in Langley.

All these departures - along with ASD/C3I Emmett Paige Jr.'s long-announced plans to step down after the election - mean honcho wanna-bes should start goosing up their resumes.

* The Bosnian O&M pile. Army Chief of Staff Dennis Reimer confirmed that higher than expected costs of Operation Joint Endeavor adversely affected O&M spending in the fourth quarter of fiscal 1996.

Reimer said that because of Bosnia "there is not a lot of O&M money left at year-end [and] what was left went for quality-of-life [support]" at Army camps and bases.

Some federal IT industry executives said the O&M shortfall hit fourth-quarter PC sales hard with as much as $50 million to $100 million in DODwide IT funds sucked out for Bosnia.

Reimer said the Army received about $600 million extra in O&M funding for Bosnia in 1997 but added that's not enough. "We'll have to ask Congress for more money " he said.

* The thin Sprint line. DISA has started commercializing comms in Bosnia and Hungary awarding Sprint a $36 million contract to replace tactical networks in Bosnia Croatia and Hungary currently operated by the 5th Signal Command. The company already has started to install a $3.6 million LAN in Kaposvar Hungary.

The contract has a life span of 18 months but the main U.S. force is supposed to leave in December and the smaller follow-on force will leave in March of next year. What gives with the other year of the pact?

* CHS-2 goes ultra. GTE just added rugged versions of the 64-bit Sun workstation line to the Army CHS-2 contract. Chris Marzilli GTE's CHS-2 program manager said the company has moved $93 million worth of gear on the contract to date covering orders for 1 300 workstations of which 800 have been shipped. GTE also won the first big job for the Army's future WIN network a $45.2 million pact to insert ATM technology into existing battlefield comm gear.

* Why lease when you can own? That's the approach DOD took with its next-generation military satellite communications plan opting to buy $50 billion worth of satellites and some 29 000 Earth stations well into the next century. Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Dickman the Pentagon's space architect did not indicate where he intends to find all this real money.