Pentagon | The Contracting Education Academy

February 1, 2019 By cs

Bureaucrats in the Defense Department: An ethnography

Comedians have gotten a lot of mileage out of the plodding pace of bureaucracy.

It’s such a common criticism that even Disney is in on the joke: “Zootopia” had its choice of any animal, but chose to portray bureaucrats as painfully slow-moving sloths.

It’s funny because it’s true. Bureaucracies are excruciatingly slow.

This sluggishness comes from two factors: the need to build consensus among multiple stakeholders and a constraint-driven structure. From my time at Headquarters Marine Corps, I still remember the yellow routing sheet with its dozens of departmental signature blocks, each representing someone who needed to sign off on my policy paper before it could be presented to a decision-maker. I would affix my paper to the routing sheet and send it to the next office for approval — then gently remind them days later to act on it. The process is often slow, ideas are sometimes starved to death, and the results are rarely satisfying.

Keep reading this article at: https://warontherocks.com/2019/01/bureaucrats-in-the-defense-department-an-ethnography/

January 25, 2019 By cs

No, the Pentagon did not waste $28 billion

Last week, headlines blared with claims that the Defense Department had failed to spend $28 billion in time, forfeiting all that money back to the US Treasury.

The story said the Pentagon had “let $28 billion go to waste,” with “tens of billions of dollars unspent” as “time ran out.”

This would be an awesome and scandalous story, were it true. Fortunately, it’s not. Just about all of this $28 billion in taxpayer funds will be spent. What this story really highlights is the arcane complexity of the budget execution process at the world’s largest organization. The Pentagon receives a lot of criticism on many different topics, but this is one instance in which piling on is unwarranted.

Keep reading this article at: https://breakingdefense.com/2019/01/no-the-pentagon-did-not-waste-28-billion/

January 24, 2019 By cs

The fight for a massive Pentagon cloud contract is heating up

Top tech companies are launching a bidding war for a massive Pentagon cloud contract, even as their workforces are pressing them to refuse all military work.

In addition to the protests from employees, the bidding process for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, contract is bogged down by infighting between traditional defense contractors and the big tech companies that threaten to edge them out of a lucrative business opportunity—and the Department of Defense worries that all of the controversy distracts from its objective of obtaining the same basic cloud computing capabilities already available for consumers, which it says are necessary to better protect soldiers’ lives on the battlefield.

Although DoD says it’s too early to predict the ultimate value of the contract, JEDI is estimated to be worth about $10 billion. The contract will be awarded for a two-year period, with options to renew for five years and then three years after that. The price-tag makes the JEDI contract tempting for even the largest of tech firms. (Google, for instance, announced in February that its cloud business earned more than $1 billion per quarter, while Amazon Web Services nets over $5 billion each quarter.) The company that wins the contract will also have a foot in the door for future Pentagon work, as the DoD looks to rapidly expand its artificial intelligence capabilities.

Keep reading this article at: https://gizmodo.com/the-fight-for-a-massive-pentagon-cloud-contract-is-heat-1825517332/amp

January 4, 2019 By cs

Someone is waging a secret war to undermine the Pentagon’s huge cloud contract

As some of the biggest U.S. technology companies have lined up to bid on the $10 billion contract to create a massive Pentagon cloud computing network, the behind-the-scenes war to win it has turned ugly.

In the past several months, a private investigative firm has been shopping around to Washington reporters a 100-plus-page dossier raising the specter of corruption on the part of senior Defense Department and private company officials in the competition for the JEDI cloud contract. But at least some of the dossier’s conclusions do not stand up to close scrutiny.

The dossier insinuates that a top aide to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis worked with Mattis and others to steer the contracting process to favor Amazon Web Services, or AWS — and enrich the aide. The aim of the dossier seems clear: to prevent the deal from going solely to AWS, the odds-on favorite in part because it operates the CIA’s classified commercial cloud. Far less clear, however, is who backed its creation and distribution.

It’s an unusually hardball form of backroom maneuvering in the world of lucrative but rigidly controlled defense contracting. The firm that prepared the dossier, RosettiStarr, shopped it to various Washington reporters earlier this year. Defense One was given a copy in May. At the time, RossettiStar President and CEO Rich Rosetti declined to reveal who funded the firm’s efforts.

Former defense officials told Defense One they received inquiries about the allegations from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Reuters, and the Intercept. For months, the accusations went unaired by news outlets, including Defense One and Nextgov, sister publications in Atlantic Media’s Government Executive Media Group.

But in the past few weeks, some of the information in the dossier has surfaced in various publications. Now that the dossier’s targets have been publicly accused, they are speaking out. In exclusive interviews with Defense One and Nextgov, they vehemently deny any wrongdoing and seek to turn the spotlight on their mysterious accusers.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/08/someone-waging-secret-war-undermine-pentagons-huge-cloud-contract/150685/

December 21, 2018 By cs

Hard-nosed Pentagon negotiator removed from job

Trump administration officials are removing the Pentagon’s top weapon buying negotiator, who racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel costs and pushed a controversial plan to slow payments to defense contractors, Defense One has learned.

**Shay D. Assad, Director, DoD’s Defense Pricing and Contracting Initiatives**

Shay Assad, a senior Defense Department bureaucrat, is being reassigned to a post in Massachusetts, one unconnected to the contract negotiating team he has led for seven years, according to current and former defense officials familiar with the decision.

In the coming weeks, Assad will be moved from his position as director of defense pricing and contracting initiatives to a lateral position within the Defense Contract Management Agency in the Boston area, current and former officials said.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defenseone.com/politics/2018/12/shay-assad/153591

Comedians have gotten a lot of mileage out of the plodding pace of bureaucracy.

Last week, headlines blared with claims that the Defense Department had failed to spend $28 billion in time, forfeiting all that money back to the US Treasury.

Top tech companies are launching a bidding war for a massive Pentagon cloud contract, even as their workforces are pressing them to refuse all military work.

As some of the biggest U.S. technology companies have lined up to bid on the $10 billion contract to create a massive Pentagon cloud computing network, the behind-the-scenes war to win it has turned ugly.

Trump administration officials are removing the Pentagon’s top weapon buying negotiator, who racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel costs and pushed a controversial plan to slow payments to defense contractors, Defense One has learned.

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