Digital Government

New satellite signals improve civilian use

The addition of two new civilian signals to navigation satellites widely used by federal agencies ranging from the Forest Service to the Census Bureau will provide greater accuracy and reliability with little or no increase in the cost of the receivers, according to top managers in the Global Posit

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

Army awards three BPAs for PC wares

The Army last week awarded blanket purchase agreements potentially worth a total of $300 million to three resellers to provide peripherals, accessories and software for its installed base of desktop and laptop computers. Comark Federal Systems, Government Technology Services Inc. and Vanstar Govern

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

Hill proposes $200M more for Year 2000 fix

Congress, faced with the ticking of the Year 2000 clock, used the 1998 supplemental appropriations bill to add more than $200 million in funding to help the Federal Aviation Administration and the Treasury Department rectify computer date problems in key systems before the turn of the century. The

  • By Bob Brewin and Nicole Lewis
Digital Government

Locate GPS info on Coast Guard site

Last month the Pentagon and the Transportation Department agreed to add two civilian frequencies to the Global Positioning System, giving added importance to an upcoming Coast Guard meeting on civilian GPS. The Pentagon/DOT agreement, according to Vice President Al Gore, will improve numerous comme

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

Army picks three vendors to provide peripherals, software products

Sixteen months after restructuring its manufacturing and business operations, HewlettPackard Co. today slashed prices by up to 37 percent on its Unixbased technical workstations.

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

GPS system to gain two signals in 2005

Vice President Al Gore said a joint military/civilian board agreed to add two additional signals for civil users to Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites slated to go into service in 2005.

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

Remote Rx

Even if doctors still made house calls, they probably couldn't help the 30 troops who man a remote U.S. Army communications outpost on Hill 1326 in Bosnia. In good weather, the hill is a two to threehour Humvee drive from the nearest paved road. It takes even longer in the winter, when the troops

  • By Bob Brewin and Brian Robinson
Digital Government

DOD's Valletta joins SRA

Anthony Valletta, acting assistant secretary of Defense for command, control communications and intelligence (ASD/C3I), plans to join SRA International Inc. as a vice president in federal systems after he retires this week, Federal Computer Week has learned.

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

Army views space as ultimate 'high ground'

Looking almost three decades into the future, the Army has started planning the technology that will drive its forces in 2025, or what it calls the Army After Next (AAN).

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

Intercepts

* DISA/GSA lovein? Look for a new spirit of cooperation between the Defense Information Systems Agency and the General Services Administration on joint network development. DISA's director, Lt. Gen. David Kelley, and Federal Technology Service Commissioner Dennis Fischer pledged to harmonize effor

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

Agencies start to wield past-performance club

Federal agencies have started to wield the pastperformance stick that Congress gave them in information technology reform legislation by using vendors' success rates on previous IT contracts to evaluate bids on pending pacts. One of the more strict pastperformance evaluations in government is the

  • By Bob Brewin, L. Scott Tillett and Elana Varon
Digital Government

DOD draft shifts ASD/C3I focus/mission

The draft blueprint for the Pentagon's key command and control office calls for a laserlike focus on information superiority and recommends that the Defense Department establish a new assistant secretary of Defense for information superiority to replace the current assistant secretary of Defense f

  • By Bob Brewin and John Monroe
Digital Government

GPO's Web site muscles up on links to federal documents

I.F. Stone, the legendary Washington, D.C., journalist who believed it was better to read government documents than to interview people, would love the Government Printing Office's site on the World Wide Web. That's because the GPO site (www.gpo.gov) is a point of entry to an increasing mass of raw

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

Peacekeeping battalion crafts comm support

EAGLE BASE, Tuzla, Bosnia No one has written the manual on how to provide communications support to a longterm peacekeeping mission, but the 141st Signal Battalion headquarters here at the main base camp of U.S. forces in the former Yugoslavia has enough experience to write at least a rough draf

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

Satellite launch marks 'new era for warfighter'

The Defense Department entered a new age of communications this week with the successful launch of a widebandwidth satellite that can zap a total of 96 megabits per second (megabits/sec) of data to small, deployable terminals that are part of a system modeled after commercial, directbroadcast TV systems.

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

DOD envisions 'system of systems'

The Defense Information Systems Agency's architectural responsibilities would be enhanced and solidified in a draft plan for the reorganization of the Defense Department's command and control and its information technology management and oversight. The draft, which is under evaluation by Secretary

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

Army launches $1 billion wholesale logistics project

The Army last week kicked off a billiondollarplus project to modernize and eventually privatize key elements of its wholesale logistics system, which supplies troops with everything from helmets to helicopters. The Wholesale Logistics Modernization Program (WLMP), which includes a $9 billion inve

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

Army to award leasing, peripherals pacts

The Army this month is expected to refresh its PC offerings with two new contracts: one for leasing and the other for a broad range of peripherals. Lt. Col. Mary Fuller, product manager of the Army's Small Computer Program (SCP) at Fort Monmouth, N.J., said Army Leasing1 (AL1) has the potential t

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

DISA chief says GCCS to shift to Windows NT

The Defense Information Systems Agency plans to fundamentally shift clients for the Global Command and Control System (GCCS) from the Unix operating system to Microsoft Corp. Windows NT running on PCs in order to reduce costs, according to DISA director Lt. Gen. David Kelley.

  • By Bob Brewin
Digital Government

Intercepts

* Schmoozing Hamre. According to my Ering antenna site, Microsoft Corp.'s chief information officer, John Connors, dropped in last week for a highlevel sales call on Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, and topping his list of conversation topics was the Defense Department's Medium Assurance P

  • By Bob Brewin
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