The communications systems at the US Central Command headquarters

Unfortunately this is common throughout the DoD, where the longstanding assumption is that it is possible to have a single enterprise solution for all X, and that doing this will be much more effective and efficient overall.

I don't think it's because the people involved are completely insane; they see that IT projects in DoD are expensive, and the expense is seemingly due to government/DoD overhead not intrinsically associated to solving the software development problem. So if you could increase the amount of software you can deliver with the same overhead, it should be more efficient, right?

Of course, it's nearly impossible to make this work, but the real solution (significantly reduce the overhead so that it's again efficient to build smaller solutions and iterate improvements from there) is impossible to imagine in DoD.

It wasn’t thrown away. It’s going through a new iteration based on newly identified requirements. There’s a link in the article with more details.

https://www.c4isrnet.com/show-reporter/dodiis/2018/08/14/the...

And if it had worked as they thought it would, it would have been totally worth it.

It’s a different level of money altogether, but 300M is a small amount of 715 BN dollars in the DoD budget planned for FY 2022.

But when you’re operating at that scale, 300M is almost in the “let’s try it and see if it works”.

DNI had 60+ BN in appropriations for FY 2020.

Thanks for the IRC bot!

As recently as 2018, it was actually working really well (for agencies it rolled out to). Without going into too much specifics, the technical challenges were more or less solved. There were some messy issues to work through still, but there are institutional and even practical barriers that needed to be overcome. When DNI Clapper left/after the administration change, ICITE presumably lost its champion(s) and new political appointees wanted to make their mark. Such is life inside the beltway, for better or worse.

Edit: slight edit - I will say the need for ICITE in its original conceived form has diminished somewhat as services have moved to shared cloud services. It’s not all doom and gloom.

> …so we paid BAE a third of a billion dollars to build a software platform that we then threw away in less than a decade, all because of an unrealistic original goal (“a single platform for the US IC”).

In their defense, that "unrealistic original goal" is a mistake all kinds of enterprises make, because at a high level there are obvious benefits and the problems are harder to see because they're at a lower level.

>>>There's a mention of "KVM switches".

I'm not at a Combatant Command, but work in a smaller military operations center. KVMs are prolific because we frequently need to switch between computers on discrete networks with different classifications. For example: an unclassified network (with access to the World Wide Web, most common workstations for daily business), a US-only SECRET network, and 1-2 other US + $friendlycountry SECRET networks. You'll have 2 monitors and 2 keyboards at one workstation, each supporting 2 of the 4 networks. It's a mess.

Still? It’s an intentional form of MAC based upon a combination of labels and physical separation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_access_control

"MA SECDEF" is probably the SECDEF's Military Assistant:

> In the United States Department of Defense, a military assistant is a military officer serving as aide to very senior civilian (typically a presidential appointee in Office of the Secretary of Defense or in the service secretariats)[1]

I'd guess that "MASECDEF QTRS" is that officer's "home phone" (at their living quarters).

Based on the office phones I've used, I'm guessing that the buttons with the 7-digit phone numbers are just used to select phone lines that this phone can make/receive calls on, not speed-dial numbers. I'd also guess that they're on an internal military phone network that's not directly reachable from the regular phone system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_assistant

The plain numbers are likely the incoming lines/numbers. Like an indicator to show whether or not 'line 1' is ringing.

Usually with government systems, they use a lot of commercial off the shelf (COTS) either configured or modified (MOTS) to only use FIPS certified implementation/module.

You'll see technologies like S/MIME, IPSEC, and CAC Cards or other tokens/smartcards.

If you're referring to the walk-through by the news crew, there is a certain amount of sanitization and scripting that happens anytime a military organization hosts a PR event like this, but the comms equipment overview on this website is spot-on.

Source: spent way too much time in my military days in staff/HQ buildings like this.