These are happy days for Pentagon contractors

[bigtree]

These are happy days for people who style themselves as Pentagon contractors. With the nation lulled into a permanent sense of war, and deficit-defying budgets earmarked for anything military, technology companies can't believe their luck.

While inadequately-protected soldiers are being shot in Iraq, the US government expects to spend $200bn on "a new internet" for the Department of Defense, the New York Times reports today. The Global Information Grid, or GIG, is a ten-year project to provide a completely new information network uniting the services. Beneficiaries this time will include IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems, alongside more familiar names like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon in a giant consortium formed six weeks ago to build GIG.

On the official GIG website, even Donald Rumsfeld has bought into the bloggers' hopeless, huggy, Thesp-like religion of interconnectednessivity, otherwise known as I've Done My First Acid Trip, Mom! As you can see from his quote here, Rummy will soon be keynoting at a "knowledge management" seminar, near you.

GIG isn't actually new, the Times fails to tell us. It has been the subject of wary reports from the government spending watchdog the Government Accounting Office since 2001, and of hopeful PowerPoint presentations for even longer. What is new is that it will finally get funding, beyond most of the consortium members' wildest dreams. Infrastructure spending on what the Times calls 'connections' will be $24 billion in the next five years, with cryptography spending another $5 billion.

full article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/14/dod_global_information_grid/

[DenaliDemocrat]

1. The big push under Bush

has been to outsource all kinds of government work to Contractors.


Remember the next time you go over a bridge supposedly "built" by the Corps of Engineers. They did not do it. It was outsourced to the lowest bidder.