April 6, 2015: For over a decade now the U.S. Army intelligence bureaucracy has been trying to cope with a procurement disaster that will not go away. This all began when the U.S. Air Force developed a data mining and analysis system that, when adapted for army use, turned out to be more expensive and less effective than commercial products. A 2012 government investigation reported the problems in great detail. But senior army commanders and Department of Defense procurement bureaucrats continued to block the use of commercial products the troops preferred. Now SOCOM (Special Operations Command) troops are complaining that a superior system (Palantir) they have been using since 2009 is becoming more difficult to obtain because of more aggressive interference from the procurement bureaucracy and contractor lobbyists.
The problem was that the army system (DCGS or Distributed Common Ground System) was cobbled together on the fly, in the midst of a war and has not aged well. Several investigations, in response to growing complaints from the troops, found that the army refused to recognize the problems with DCGS or get them fixed, or allow cheaper and more capable commercial software (like Palantir) to be used instead of DCGS.
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