Intercepts

BOEING CLOSE CALL. DISA "seriously considered" not exercising its options beyond the second year of the two-year $2 billion DISN Support Services-Global (DSSG) contract held by Boeing Information Services, a top agency official told the Interceptor. The contract was awarded in 1996.

The official added that the problems with DSSG and Boeing IS, which is due to be acquired by Science Applications International Corp. this fall, led DISA to build a broad range of engineering and support services into a contract vehicle designed to support worldwide network management.

The $400 million contract was awarded to GTE Corp. last month and goes by the ungainly acronym DNMSS-G/NEC (see story, Page 18, to decrypt this and to read more about the contract). It went to the Information Systems Division, the only portion of GTE Government Systems not slated for acquisition by General Dynamics later this year. Mike Choffel, director of DISA programs at ISD, believes the five-year DISA contract would make the division "more valuable" to any would-be purchaser.

A Boeing spokeswoman defended DSSG, saying "the company has turned the contract around" and has booked substantially more orders.

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SEEKING AN N6. Vice Adm. Robert Natter, the Navy's N6 widget boss, conducted his portion of the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet briefing July 7 in Quantico, Va., with all the verve of a man who had a long-term stake in the project. But shortly after the briefing ended, the Navy issued a release saying Natter had been tapped for a move up the food chain as deputy chief of naval operations for plans, policy and operations.

I guess because Natter would like to have the ability to use the N/MCI in his new job, he probably will continue to back it. But hey, who knows what the new guy will do? There's no word yet on an inside-track candidate for the N6 job, but one high-ranking official suggested that the Navy often selects numbered-fleet commanders - Natter came from the 7th Fleet - who are not long for the job.

Suggestions, anyone?

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BYE-BYE, VACATION. The N/MCI - formerly called the Navy Worldwide Intranet and the Naval Intranet - definitely represents good news for vendors eager for a slice of the $2 billion project. The bad news is the project is on such a fast track that Joe Cipriano, the new Navy program executive officer for IT, wants interested bidders to submit "concept papers'' by July 22, just 15 days after last week's kickoff. That schedule sure does put a dent in all those Duck, N.C., beach house rentals this month.

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FIREWALLING THE IG? Anyone trying to access the World Wide Web site of DOD Inspector General Eleanor Hill (dodig.osd.mil) last week would have received a curt "access denied" message from behind a newly installed firewall. I know Art Money and the rest of the crew at ASD/C3I need to protect DOD Web sites from attackers. But walling off the IG seems only to prevent taxpayers from having access to IG reports that delineate waste, fraud and abuse. Not to worry, an OSD spokeswoman said, this is a temporary problem due to be rectified "soon." But she said she could not provide a firm date on when all us mere mortals can once again download IG reports at our leisure.