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Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

defenseone.com

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Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#81

Post by h4b4n3r0 »

ryandrake wrote: post #74
h4b4n3r0 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been there, done that. I feel much worse about paying my federal taxes now. Federal contractor (to whom we were a subcontractor) spent at least five times what they should have, and very little of it trickled down to us. They also were a “broken telephone” between us and the end customer, so we didn’t get much user feedback. Any call (not _video_ call mind you, a phone call) with them had a minimum of 10 people, and…

Stop me when you’ve seen this one: Prime contractor is a one or two-person shop. They don’t do any work, but subcontract the entire contract to the huge company that is doing the actual work. The prime contractor’s job is to be an Alaskan Native American-owned or Female Amputee-owned or some other underrepresented minority-owned business so the government can say they work with minority-owned businesses. The prime do…

Ours was very large. In fact, I'd say, a 2-person do-nothing prime would be a vast improvement over what we had, especially if they did not have any illusions about their own level of competence. To see the situation in the positive light, however, I have vastly improved my project management skills. Making _anything_ stick on the other end was a non-trivial endeavor.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#82

Post by cryptonector »

beaconstudios wrote: post #63
guiomie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is right. Not sure if it's called corruption tho. No one is getting paid on the side.

at best it's subversion of a policy that is intended to enforce some amount of competition.

It certainly is that.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#83

Post by scrumper »

zero_intp wrote: post #62
scrumper wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This applies just as much to private sector RFPs too. If you're a vendor and you get an RFP out of the blue, you're not going to win it. RFI process is usually far more open.

My first job in the '80s was doing RFI/RFP shotgunning for a mom & pop (my mom & pop) defense consulting firm out of the GSA register. We would essentially cold-respond to everything in our domain. From that experience I learned that there were some genuine requests with no fix in.

Interesting. My experience is all commercial, not government. Pleased to hear there was some good behavior (at least in defense in the '80s!)

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#84

Post by forapurpose »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #14

Well... To be fair, it's an AWS spec sheet reworded as an RFP. Other cloud providers - even Google and Microsoft - can't meet the requirements, because they don't have the same marketing jargon. For example, there's a requirement in the RFP for a "ruggedized" storage product. That's a made up word that Amazon uses to describe AWS Snowball, so no other company satisfies the requirement. Some other AWS-only requirement…

AFAICT the above is from the reporting that DefenseOne is criticizing; that doesn't make it false, but it means we shouldn't take it at face value.

It was discussed recently on HN and, IMHO, mostly discredited. For example, the RAM amounts are wrong for Google and Azure, and certainly they have 150 miles between data centers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17754079

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#85

Post by ccornil2 »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #14

Well... To be fair, it's an AWS spec sheet reworded as an RFP. Other cloud providers - even Google and Microsoft - can't meet the requirements, because they don't have the same marketing jargon. For example, there's a requirement in the RFP for a "ruggedized" storage product. That's a made up word that Amazon uses to describe AWS Snowball, so no other company satisfies the requirement. Some other AWS-only requirement…

You're just restating points from the Vanity Fair article, which was sourced almost exclusively from the dossier. In reality, "ruggedized" is a fairly common DOD term for battlefield IT. The 32g RAM is mostly arbitrary and others, including Microsoft can deliver it. The single provider solution makes sense when you're trying to centralize a fragmented cloud environment.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#86

Post by ccornil2 »

joeax wrote: post #66
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #14

Well... To be fair, it's an AWS spec sheet reworded as an RFP. Other cloud providers - even Google and Microsoft - can't meet the requirements, because they don't have the same marketing jargon. For example, there's a requirement in the RFP for a "ruggedized" storage product. That's a made up word that Amazon uses to describe AWS Snowball, so no other company satisfies the requirement. Some other AWS-only requirement…

> Not to mention the idiotic idea of a single provider solution. I'm surprised this isn't being discussed more. With a huge $10bil cloud I would think you would want to select a secondary vendor to distribute redundant workloads and data storage. Even if Azure or GCP couldn't meet some requirements today it's a ten-year project and both are expanding quickly. Azure has recently brought online government-specific loca…

The Pentagon already has programs like MilCloud in place for redundancy. JEDI is far from the Pentagon's only cloud program.

Btw, Google is years away from getting the kind of security certifications you'd need to run a cloud from the Pentagon. Oh, and the Project Maven thing.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#87

Post by ccornil2 »

eli wrote: post #12

I’ve been getting what I assume are geotargeted ads for this http://monopolyamazon.com/ for months on twitter (I work a block from the White House). For example https://twitter.com/setonmotley/status/981262337905602560?s=...

Me too, every day since April. That sort of Twitter campaign costs tens of thousands of dollars. My bet is Motley and the dossier are related.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#88

Post by altmind »

eli wrote: post #12

I’ve been getting what I assume are geotargeted ads for this http://monopolyamazon.com/ for months on twitter (I work a block from the White House). For example https://twitter.com/setonmotley/status/981262337905602560?s=...

I've gone to monopolyamazon.com, then proceed to http://lessgovernment.org link in the page bottom where I was served a banner calling Net neutrality a solution looking for a problem. This website have very strange affiliations.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#89

Post by eli »

altmind wrote: post #88
eli wrote: post #12

I’ve been getting what I assume are geotargeted ads for this http://monopolyamazon.com/ for months on twitter (I work a block from the White House). For example https://twitter.com/setonmotley/status/981262337905602560?s=...

I've gone to monopolyamazon.com, then proceed to http://lessgovernment.org link in the page bottom where I was served a banner calling Net neutrality a solution looking for a problem. This website have very strange affiliations.

Also questioning both climate change and the harm of second-hand smoking. There's a whole constellation of right-wing think tanks that raise money from Exxon, Koch brothers, etc and then lobby "against regulation" in a variety of topics of interest.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#90

Post by closeparen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #67
guiomie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is right. Not sure if it's called corruption tho. No one is getting paid on the side.

The practice is called "single-sourcing". It's pretty clearly an example of corruption; the entire purpose of single-sourcing a contract is to defeat the RFP, or bidding-out, process. A decision is being made by someone who isn't supposed to have the authority to make it.

Do you drive the cheapest contraption that could technically haul you from A to B?

Did you type this on the cheapest thing capable of making HTTP requests?

Do you live in the cheapest structure capable of maintaining its interior at a non-life-threatening temperature?

I submit that lowest-bidder rules are patently absurd. People who have to deal with something day in and day out ought to have the authority to select a reasonable one.

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