The Army has spent years defending a multibillion-dollar intelligence system that critics say costs too much and does too little. A new internal report has found that there's a simple, relatively inexpensive program that could handle many of the same jobs at a fraction of the cost. For the past eight months, though, the Pentagon has kept the report hidden away.
Members of Congress have been asking Defense Department officials to send them the assessment, a copy of which was obtained by Foreign Policy, but the Pentagon has yet to do so. At issue is the Army's Distributed Common Ground System, expected to cost nearly $11 billion over 30 years and built by a consortium of major Beltway contractors, including Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics. The system is meant to give troops on the ground an easy way to collect intelligence about terrorists and enemy fighters, and then create detailed reports and maps that they can share with each other to plan and conduct operations. But critics -- and even some troops -- have long complained that the system doesn't actually work. They say it's too slow and hard to use, and that it has left them searching for alternatives in the war zone.
The system's high cost and technical failings prompted a search for other options. Palantir Technologies, a fast-growing Silicon Valley firm, told the Pentagon that its off-the-shelf systems could accomplish most of the same tasks but cost far less -- millions, rather than billions. The Marine Corps, Special Operations forces, the CIA, and a host of other government agencies already use it. Army officials, though, said Palantir wasn't up to the job. Now, a 57-page report by the Pentagon's acquisitions arm basically says the Army was wrong to dismiss the Palantir system. The study instead gives Palantir high marks on most of the Army's 20 key requirements for the intelligence system, including the ability to analyze large amounts of information, including critical data about terrorist networks and the locations of explosive devices, and synchronize it in a way that helps troops on the ground combat their enemies more effectively.
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The report consists of a detailed set of charts, graphs, and analyses. It doesn't say that Palantir could replace the Army system, and its authors didn't conduct a head-to-head comparison of the two. But it concludes that Palantir, which has collected legions of fans in national security circles and has contracts with the CIA and FBI, performs "very good" or "excellent" on most key requirements, including some that Army brass had long insisted the company was unable to fulfill.
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Army officials have long complained that Palantir cannot be used with other applications that are already incorporated into the Army system. An Army spokesman compared the problem last year to being able to download and read a document, but not make changes or be able to share the new version. That lack of "interoperability" has been a key reason why the Army has said that it couldn't move to Palantir's cheaper system.
Palantir is just one application, and "is not interoperable with all the other apps right now, so that's the problem," Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno said in May 2013. In July 2012, Lynn Schnurr, the chief information officer for the Army's intelligence office, said, "Palantir addresses a segment of the capabilities" of DCGS-A and "does not interoperate" with certain command and control systems that the Army has to use. And in December of that year, Maj. Gen. Harold Greene, a top Army acquisitions official, said the lack of interoperability in any system was a "red line."
But according to the Pentagon report, dated July 2013, Palantir received a score of three, indicating "good," on a one-to-five scale measuring interoperability. And its front-end, or user interface, allows people to collaborate on documents at the same time, the report concluded.
That's not the same as saying Palantir is completely interoperable with the Army DCGS-A, but it undermines the assertions by Odierno, Schnurr, and others who say Palantir's alleged inability to properly work with the Army system is a key weakness that prevents the military from switching to it.
Palantir's overall report card consisted of "very good" and "excellent" on 11 of the 20 criteria. It received a rating of "good" in three areas, and "minimal" in four others, including the ability to synchronize surveillance and reconnaissance information, such as video feeds from drones.
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