In February, when the military released its budget for the upcoming fiscal year, the Air Force said it planned to spend $4.6 billion on cyber security. Which was a little bit odd, since the Pentagon said it only planned to spend $2.3 billion for the entire Defense Department — the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, everyone.
And so begins a look by Nextgov into the migraine-inducing, Borges-esque world of dot-mil defense spending. The Air Force asking for twice the money as the armed forces overall? Just one of the many head-scratchers uncovered in the Pentagon’s network defense ledgers. At this point, the services can’t even agree on what’s “cyber security,” what’s plain ol’ IT infrastructure, and what’s… something else. (Thus the giant discrepancy between the Air Force’s figures and the Pentagon’s.)
“When people can’t even agree about the most basic terminology, you know there is going to be a lot of confusion,” quips one Brookings Institution non-resident fellow. “The chances there aren’t billions of dollars in redundancies are slim to none, and slim is out of town.”
Oxymoran — the military version of the moran.
And the only actual result will be that a TSA guard will confiscate your nail clippers before you are allowed to browse a .gov site
Knowing how my US govt works, they’re probably still using many of the old Dept. of War rules. Old laws need to be condensed to their root intent then updated to fit current problems. Convoluted, incomprehensible laws or budgets will be all that is output as long as lawyers and crooks write the rules.
Speaking of wasted military expenses, Obama and Holder have backed down and will send Khalid Sheikh Mohammad back for a military commission trial.
Remember how Obama stopped the commission’s trial of KSM upon taking office even though KSM had indicated he’d plead guilty.
Now that process has to start over, wasting more time and resources for nothing more than two years of grandstanding.
Overall it was an expensive waste of money and an unmitigated political defeat for Obama.
#3 – it’s not a waste, it’s a stimulus payment. Remember it’s not only the lawyers you are paying – think of all the poor Maitre’d and Mercedes mechanics that also benefit whenever you give lawyers a couple of million $
Having spent over 20 years in the USAF I can tell you that IT is procured by idiots. anyone involved with the Zenith Z-248 or the Unisys contract that followed will remember what an abortion they where and they set us back an additional 3 years.
I would suggest that military IT be run like a corporation with qualified professionals instead of the inexperienced idiots that are there now.
I can’t vouch for the other services, but they can’t be any better off. Everything is at least 5 years out of date, or proprietary ALWAYS.
I would suggest that military IT be run like a corporation with qualified professionals instead of the inexperienced idiots that are there now.
RSA, the makers of in-SecurID?
Labor unions succeeded in getting Pres Obama to eliminate Rumsfeld’s streamlining of the Pentagon, wasting billions yearly.
At least father and daughter Cheney were successful and got Obama to agree to a military tribunal for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Heckuva job, Barry!
How do you know anyone with any ‘responsibility’ who works for (elected or otherwise) the government is lying?
As a friend of mine says “the train has left the station”. It’s over.
I just realized today (I’m past 60) that when I die, and if the family gets a tombstone, it should be inscribed in Chinese so in the future any family members will be able to find my grave without a translator.
Why so much money?
Simple.
Two words.
Black Ops.
The is a wonderful program designed to give tens of thousands of people white collar jobs with great benefits jobs doing the exact same thing redundantly that will in most cases prove as useful as building pyramids were for the Egyptians.
The extra good news is we are paying for this with borrowed money we will never pay back because we are going to go bankrupt and have to completely replace our currency and government. The bad news is what emerges will be a new nation or nations.The people that go through this will weep when they recall the pain and what was lost.
You have to understand the basic rules of the game to get into police forces
Its to follow orders
Original thinkers and those who question authority need not apply or will not last long
The whole selection process works to weed out those who “think outside the box”
So how will these wonder techno wizards deal with hackers around the world or worse – determined state run organizations – with their Commodore 63s ?
I highly recommend “Cyber Warriors” by Richard A. Clarke on this topic.
People in the cyber security business criticized Clarke for his negative assessments but that’s an endorsement as far as I’m concerned.
Richard Clarke is not very credible. He spent lots of time the last decade complaining about how Iraq was not a threat, and whining that the President demoted him. However, he never mentioned that he was the guy who nixed a spy mission in Afghanistan because he was worried that Osama would ‘boogie to Baghdad’. Why the two orders, Mr Clarke?
#11
The military is not a police force.
The military is a determined state run organization.
The most important thing I remember about my Vietnam era time in the military was “follow your orders, even if they make no sense whatsoever.”
The other important thing I remember about life in the military is that almost everything they train you to do is wrong.
Look, folks, here’s the entire history of modern “security”:
1. A government or corporation builds a multi-billion dollar system which is “secure”.
2. A fifteen-year old kid figures out that you can beat it with a four-penny finishing nail. (Can you say “Fortress Phone”?)
3. It never occurs to anyone to have these systems TESTED by fifteen-year old kids, let alone DESIGNED by them.
(It’s so much easier to throw the fifteen-year old kids in jail, design a “new” and “better” system, and siphon more billions into your corporate pockets.)
U-S-A! Num-ber ONE! U-S-A! Num-ber ONE! ^o^
As Steve Gibson says, “new is the enemy of secure”. Or something like that. Anyway, the military ought to stop reinventing the wheel, operating system wise, and use Linux. Stop using toy operating systems like Windows. Or any other proprietary OSes, that’s newly minted, and not even fully understood by the contractors.
I’m thinking the USAF avoids adopting Linux or FreeBSD, to keep from providing OJT of it, for later civilian careers. Think of all those military trained Linux techs, being set loose on the job market. Who would turn up their noses at Windows and other OSes. I’m sure Microsoft quakes at the idea of the US government choosing an Open Source OS over theirs. Just because it can be locked down more securely, by ANYONE. And it doesn’t radically change ever four years. To where it’s a whole new ball game, to learn.
Frankly, the only data security the US military seems to be concerned about, is keeping secrets from its own ranks, first. It’s citizen second. And the rest of the free world, third.
http://airforcetimes.com/news/2011/02/airforce-no-espionage-charges-for-airmen-on-wikileaks-020811w/
Thus them coming down so hard on airman Bradley Manning, for leaking some old information to Wikileaks, they just as soon never saw the light of day. But Lt. Col. Oliver North got out, after being convicted as a felon. And then got his pension restored by Congress. Of course, North was protecting Reagan/Bush’s neck. So that made it alright. And now he’s paid by Fox News to Obama-bash.
http://washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_03/028623.php
So it’s all about having the right political connections. And what secrets are kept from the public. Not what laws are broken in the act.
A Bureaucracy is never the solution to a problem – it just perpetuates itself ad infinitum !!! Look at the Pentagoons – if they don’t have a war, they will make one !!!
>> MIkeN said, on April 4th, 2011 at 8:26 pm
>> Richard Clarke is not very credible. He spent lots of time the last decade complaining about how Iraq was not a threat,
Iraq was NOT a threat.
Holy smokes, Mike, read the news, man!
And speaking of credibility, it was Clarke who was BEGGING the Bush administration to take the threat of Al Quaeda seriously.
But the Bush Administration blew him off and claimed that America’s #1 security needs was “Star Wars” to protect us from the USSR (which had been defunct already for a decade.)