Intercepts

Keep 'em Hungry

Who doesn't want and need more money?

The answer to the question seemed obvious when Paul Brubaker, president of Aquilent Inc., put it to a panel of Defense Department officials at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's TechNet International 2002 conference held last week in Washington, D.C. One answer came with an interesting twist.

Air Force Major Gen. Charles Croom Jr., vice director for the command, control, communications and computer systems directorate on the Joint Staff, noted that "the power of zeros and ones" is helping create an amazing fighting force.

But Croom also said that although network administrators would always like to get more money, they should not get too much. Organizations tend to do more when they have less, he suggested. And while DOD needs enough to carry out its mission, there are real concerns that it could waste money if it has too much.

"I'm looking for an increase, but don't give me too much of an increase," he said.

So, show me the money, but don't show me too much.

Changes at JROC?

Program managers may soon find themselves thinking about joint services requirements a little earlier in the development process.

Speaking at the TechNet conference, Navy Adm. William Fallon, vice chief of naval operations and a member of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC), said council members were wondering whether they could save time and money by assessing a project's joint viability before development is under way.

Under the current system, the council grants approvals to programs that have already been launched after the program office tweaks any problems that inhibit interoperability.

For example, the Navy is DOD's lead developer for a deployable joint command and control system, and officials must decide whether to focus on the service's own needs and then make the system usable for the other services, or focus on joint capabilities from the start, Fallon said.

"Just about every system that comes across before our eyes has alleged attributes of 'jointness,' but [most] need to be adjusted for true jointness," he said. "To be truly interoperable, [the proposals] need to be tweaked, and those tweaks are expensive."

Oh, Never Mind

There's yet another turn in the seemingly never-ending story of DOD's Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) contract.

Sprint and AT&T withdrew their protests late last month against the $450 million award to WorldCom Inc. to provide high-speed network services for researchers and scientists.

One protestor remains — Global Crossing Ltd., which won the DREN contract last year before the Defense Information Systems Agency withdrew the award after losing bidders protested.

Sprint spokesman John Polivka said that when company officials reviewed the documents they had requested from the government, they surmised that the agency would not change the award.

Although Polivka said his company continued to have concerns about "irregularities," he declined to detail them.

AT&T, the incumbent DREN contractor, provided even fewer details about why the company withdrew its protests.

Officials from the General Accounting Office have said that a decision on the protest is due July 22.

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