What's Brewin: Before Building, Lock in the Spectrum

The Defense Department released on Dec. 2 a major acquisition reform (Department of Defense Instruction 5000.02 for you wonks). The policy requires managers of any program that depends on the spectrum to affirm in writing to the Defense chief information officer that the spectrum the program needs is, or will be, available before program managers start tossing around billions of dollars.

The policy dovetails with language in the 2009 Defense authorization bill that said there was a "serious disconnect" between bandwidth requirements for projects such as the Army's $160 billion Future Combat Systems and a lack of spectrum to support those bandwidth demands. John Grimes, Defense CIO, said the new directive puts consideration of spectrum requirements early in the acquisition process "to enable better management of competing battlefield requirements that have become a growing concern."

John Young, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition technology and logistics, hailed the directive as "the first major change to acquisition policy in five years" and the 79-page document is must reading for Defense acquisition personnel and systems peddlers.

The directive has a section covering services contracts that the Government Accountability Office estimated cost more than $141 billion a year. Currently, statements for work for services contracts are mushy at best. The directive mandates that "acquisition of services shall be based on clear, performance-based requirements, [and] include identifiable and measurable cost, schedules, and performance outcomes consistent with customer needs."

The acquisition directive also calls for competitive prototyping to demonstrate technologies before Defense buys something that does not work well. The department used to do this, and my favorite example is the competition between Lockheed Martin and the now-defunct Convair to develop a turbo-prop driven, vertical take-off and landing aircraft for the Navy. The Convair XFY Pogo (as in stick) stood on its tail for takeoff, rotated to horizontal flight, and after flight, landed on its tail. Testing showed this approach had a number of shortcomings including, the fact that, according to Wikipedia, "landing was . . . a problem, as the pilot had to look back behind himself during a landing to properly stabilize the craft."

Defense abandoned both the Lockheed and Convair designs after testing showed neither was a great idea.

The Dioxin Was in the Bad Data

When the service starts withholding reports about trash dumps, it catches my attention.

The Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine has refused to make public a report on a pit near the Balad Air Force Base in Iraq where the military burns trash. The pit, according to news reports, was described by one inspector as "the worst environmental site I have ever personally visited."

That pit emitted high levels of dioxins, the cancer-causing chemical found in the Agent Orange herbicide used in Vietnam, the draft report said. For years, the Defense Department and the Veterans Administration downplayed the harmful effects of Agent Orange. So, as a Vietnam veteran, I approached an interview on the Balad pit with more than a bit of skepticism.

Dr. Craig Postlewaite, deputy director of force readiness and health assurance in the Military Health System, understood my skepticism, but said the original draft report on the Balad pit contained misleading data. Someone just cranked bad data into a spreadsheet, did some questionable math and came up with a level of dioxin emitted by the Balad burn pit far higher than the actual level, he said.

The Army redid the study, taking 138 samples of more than 4,000 chemicals spewed out by the burning trash. Postlewaite assured me that the dioxin levels did not pose a health hazard. The Army will issue a final report on the Balad burn pit by the end of the year, and it will accurately show the low level of dioxins, he said.

The department knows it's playing defense on this one. A Defense Health Board report released in June acknowledged that the draft report contained "erroneous information" on the high levels of dioxin in Balad and said, among other things, the department needs to develop "timely risk communications plans, particularly since misinformation regarding dioxin risk abounds in the military community."

Not to mention skeptics like me.

Don’t You Dare Put XP on a New Army PC

That's the bottom line of an internal memo, forwarded to me by a benevolent reader, which the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command sent last month about the service's wholesale switch to the Microsoft Vista operating system from XP.

Any PCs bought by Army users through its Computer Hardware, Enterprise Software and Solutions center at Fort Monmouth, N.J., since August have come stuffed with Windows Vista. The November memo warns commands not to replace Vista with XP, even if they have Army-certified master disks on hand.

The memo says the Army will stop supporting XP in February, except for security patches, hot fixes and other critical security updates, which will then end December 2009.

The Army's new Vista package includes some much-needed tools, including support for encryption for data at rest to protect sensitive and personally identifiable information with built-in Bitlocker software.

But, as someone who has wrestled with Vista on my wife's PC, I wonder if the Army's switch to Vista spells disaster. Vista is hard to use, hard to navigate and boots r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y. Other than that, it's just lovely.

DISA Has a Deal for You

Another kind reader sent along the Defense Information Systems Agency's fiscal 2009 price list for telecommunications services, and it looks like DISA has passed along some real savings it gets from carriers and its own circuits to end users.

In 2009, the agency will charge customers $113,336 for an OC-12 connection, which has a speed of 622 megabytes per second, or nearly 100 times faster than what the average Internet connection in a home. That price is slightly more than 5 percent off from the $119,487 the agency charged in 2008. But the line charge is only for the pipe. If a user wants classified or unclassified Internet service, then the 2009 bill comes to $905,680, down $50,217, or 5.3 percent, from the $955,897 the agency charged in 2008.

DISA slashed rates for Iridium satellite phone service even more, with the 2009 prices dropping 11.5 percent from 2008. DISA plans to charge $270.77 a month for Iridium service in 2009, down $35.08 from 2008 prices.

All the above includes the 1.25 percent contract service fee, and it looks like the agency really is paying attention to user complaints about its prices.

I'd love to hear from some DISA customers on what they think of these new rates.

It's the Holidays, so . . .

It's time to thank all the troops traveling home from their service while you are on the road.

This means when you run into troopers in a crowded airport, shake their hand, and thank them for their service.

Do you belong to an airline club? Invite a soldier, sailor or airman to join you.

Do you have a first-class or business-class upgrade? Give your seat to a solider.

Yeah, you're in the back of the plane, but you'll feel better.

I know I do.