U.S. Army aims for final draft of software mega-contract | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Army aims for final draft of software mega-contract

breakingdefense.com

14 pointswalterbell9 comments

The stakes are high because the 10-year “multi-award” contract is meant as an umbrella to modernize a wide swathe of Army software programs, although not all. The initial competition next year would select a pool of preferred vendors, who would then compete for individual programs’ software needs as “task orders” under the umbrella contract, with a maximum value of $10 billion.

This is an atrocious strategy. The Army is essentially contracting out their entire IT strategy. There is no level of oversight or incentive structure that will help an organization police such an ill defined contract.

I was just thinking to myself how amazing modern software could be for a cybernetic battlefield.

With drones everywhere one could build up a 3D photogrammetric map of the front. Image recognition and motion extraction could track individual soldiers. Mobile phones and satellite uplink could be used to track the status of every friendly individual.

You could turn the fog of war into a top-down strategy game.

I wonder how forward-thinking this mega contract is…

How do you deal with jamming? If you're fighting the Taliban, sure, you can use wireless tech all you want to do this kind of stuff. If you're fighting a technological adversary, it isn't so easy.

Probably with a bullet. An active jammer is probably the easiest thing to target with guided weapons.

Same as always: spread-spectrum, data bursts, optical links, beam-steering, encryption, mesh networks, etc...

Ukraine is a template for what is actually viable in terms of cost and capacity. In an asymmetric situation it's just playing with expensive toys for fun. In near peer conflict more dimensions are involved. But yeah i agree more abstractions could unlock more tools

In this day and age, an organization on the scale of the US Army should have software development as in-house competency, rather than something they outsource and procure.

It should be like combat engineering where it’s a set of technical skills they train and develop to solve the problems they encounter. They don’t hire an engineering firm when they need to cross a river.

Just curious: does software development for the US Army have to be Berry compliant? Made in the USA?

That contract name alone must be inducing orgasms in so many consulting partners.

Unlimited budget, no schedule, no accountability.

I don't suppose this contract pushed for auditable and trackable public open source software where possible? In order to minimize costs, maximize associated software benefits elsewhere in the economy?

Yeah, probably Microsoft and Oracle through the wazoo.

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