Legislators say DoD IT transformation too slow

The Defense Department (DoD) has a long way to go in employing information technology to make the concept of integrated war-fighting systems a reality, the chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee said at a congressional hearing. “For as difficult as it is to knit together a robust, high-speed, high-bandwidth, secure, dependable, global Internet to support the troops in the field, building it with no one person or organization in charge must be almost impossible,” Jim Saxton (R-New Jersey), chairman of the Terrorism and Unconventional Threats Subcommittee, said in his opening statement. How “this arrangement can produce anything at all is a minor miracle.”

The Defense Department receives more than $30 billion for its IT budget. It is vital that IT systems are dependable, Saxton said, but “from my perspective, we have a long way to go” to bring the promise of integrated war fighting systems.