Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The document is unavailable from my current location, but if you're asking that question, I wonder if there's even a specification of requirements for approved providers, a certification process, an auditing process... et cetera, et cetera.

I'm assuming that by "Army-unique systems and applications" they mean "Army-unique systems and applications that we can make do without (if we have to) for 100-200 days during warfare or possibly immediately and without prior notice."

Because otherwise this is just bullshit.




There's a mention of IC ITE in this document, which if it's the same thing as ICITE is an evolution / rebranding of the controversial DCGS-A cloud framework from several years ago. It has a few services that are meant to enable people to develop their own version of something like Heroku from an intelligence perspective, which is a weird combination of Big Data analytics based upon Hadoop with social media functions like sharing links to intelligence sources combined with all the fun DoD classification hoopla.

There's several IaaS offerings that have been developed within the usual consortium of defense contractors that are approved / blessed to host a lot of these "Army-unique" systems. Amazon has accomplished an incredible amount so far with the horrific procurement process that would drain half of the VC capital out there just to get through a year or two of the vetting process (which has surprisingly little to do with "is your system hackable?" as much as "does your system meet our idea of what is not hackable?").

DoD internally has its own set of standards that rival or even dwarf what IEEE and many other industry-standards bodies produce. For example, your documentation needs to conform to DoDAF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Defense_Architect... to be considered for a lot of contracts at the sort of capability level that AWS would count under.

What's this document fails to show to any IC (heck, government contracting in general) outsider is the incredible amount of pain and failure that's happened to be able to even reach these sets of goals for DoD whatsoever. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley companies have spent the past 10 years producing technology instead of very expensive, PoC and military leadership ego-driven consensus documents and standards (a colonel could be compared roughly to a partner at a VC firm - you likely don't have a good chance of finding funding in this system).

As anyone that's worked for long in large organizations built around reducing risk rather than innovating can observe, a large majority of the work goes around coordination of effort than performing work in itself due to the sheer amount of resources lost if failure occurs. This only becomes self-fulfilling as the overhead of management and consensus-building grows and adds to the collateral damage of failure both fiscally and politically.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: