New $95 Million Marine Corps Intranet And $3 Billion Extension For NMCI?

TWO DOLLAR BILLGeneral Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) was recently awarded a whopping $95 million dollar 5-year enterprise IT contract in support of the United States Marine Corps.

GDIT announced:

Through the contract, General Dynamics will design, build and integrate the first MCEITS Enterprise IT Center, which provides application hosting capabilities, enterprise shared services, access to enterprise-wide information, collaboration and information sharing across business and warfighter domains.

A separate award to EDS (A Hewlett-Packard Company) was made for a swollen $3 billion three-year extension to the Navy and Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) — With this contract expected to last into 2010.

EDS announced:

This three-year extension will add more than $3 billion to the program’s overall total contract value. The Navy Marine Corps Intranet is the single largest government contract in the history of EDS.

We won’t even begin to discuss how the EDS news release is worded–

add more than $3 billion to the program’s overall total contract value.

Sounds more like ‘added value’ to EDS and not the US Government.

Of even more concern is that these contracts appear to be vying for the same work. Was the GDIT Marine Corps contract vehicle ordered to satisfy requirements not being met by the [already bloated and over budget] EDS NMCI contract.

NMCI touts itself as the largest single network in the world. Granted, the advantages in a network with NMCI’s level of autonomy are substantially more quantifiable than that of the splintered approach used previously by the US Navy. NMCI’s contract scope would be expected to stay narrow due to security, systems/network administration, user support and equipment refreshes being funneled through a decreased number of management channels. Cost-performance improvement should be expected.

But it’s not.

NMCI became expensive and hard to manage. Complaints and overruns were the norm for years — and still are. Even US Senators have formally questioned the feasibility of NMCI.

With the ‘M’ in NMCI being for Marines, why has the Marines Corps awarded GDIT nearly $100 million in a ‘new’ and ‘independent’ IT contract?

(Also check out this old post by Robert X. Cringely for a real good ride through early NMCI.)

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/YorickPeterse YorickPeterse

    Damn, that's a sh*tload of money…

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/chuckrey Rich Chuckrey

    Quick update – EDS promptly removed their press release sometime soon after this article was published. It can now be found through http://www.eds.com/news/releases/2905/” rel=”nofollow”>Google cache.

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/Jim_Mills Jim_Mills

    It's the Microsoft Syndrome. It will be too expensive to replace NMCI, so just keep throwing money at it. It is the same reason the DoD is still running XP and Office 2003.

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/jark Scott Jarkoff

    In all seriousness, would you rather DoD be running Vista over XP?

    Many DoD commands, including the whole of the Air Force, have already migrated to Office 2007. Just because NMCI and ONE-NET are behind the power curve doesn't mean the rest of DoD is in the same proverbial boat. ;-)

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/Jim_Mills Jim_Mills

    Well I meant that is why they are not running OSX or Ubuntu.

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/jark Scott Jarkoff

    While I would just love for at least a better form of integration of Apple and Microsoft, I find it hard to believe that many people outside of the true geeks would really benefit from Linux usage. Imagine the costs to hire an effectively trained workforce to troubleshoot desktop Linux!

  • http://www.aaacaricatures.com grapeapester

    General Dynamics has many Government contracts

  • ikeeickholdt

    I work on NMCI and yes, sometimes I find areas that need adjustment however, all-in-all, I strongly believe that the contract adds a great deal of value to the Navy and Marine Corp. There are substantial metrics for financials, support times, overall system up times etc. If you folks are those weenie types, like GM, that thinks that if the client does not have the latest and greatest, you need your heads examined. Stability, interoperability and maintainability… that is what should be important to a client, not, “hey dude, look at this cool gadget… that's weird, it went offline again”

  • ikeeickholdt

    Vista blows, I am hoping for a more stable platform in Windows 7.