Pentagon’s Much-Hyped $5 Billion Computer Too Buggy for Test

Army Continues Cheering Crash-Prone Boondoggle

The Pentagon’s massive, and enormously expensive Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS), an information sharing computer system, has a long, troubled history of failure. The Pentagon insists it’s gotten much better though, and has been trumpeting it for “saving lives.”

Just don’t ask them to prove it. Several years and $5 billion later, the Army has announced DCGS is going to be withdrawn from a planned testing exercise later this year because of “continued significant software incident reports” and “overall network operational reliability issues.”

In layman’s terms, it doesn’t work. In 2011, we reported that the system, then only $2.7 billion worth, was not meeting its goals, crashed all the time, and didn’t work very well when it didn’t crash.

Three years, and another $2.3 billion have come and gone, and it is clear that months of Pentagon statements cheering the system were only another example of lies to justify the wasted money on a system that is so buggy they dare not even put it to a serious test, because it just won’t work.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.