A decade and about $5 billion in, the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS), the Pentagon is still struggling with the all-purpose intelligence network that’s supposed to share all the latest data on all the latest wars in real time. Today, officials revealed the DCGS was down during the recent attack on the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz.
This would seem to explain a lot of the questions surrounding the strike, like why attacks continued against the hospital for nearly an hour after MSF contacted the Pentagon about the strikes. It could well be this is the sort of thing DCGS was supposed to handle if it worked at all.
Despite the revelation potentially being the latest in a series of excuses for the attack, the Pentagon is downplaying the incident, refusing to discuss any impact it might have had on the bombing, and reiterating their confidence in the ongoing internal investigation into the attack.
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R – CA) was particularly critical of the revelation, having been a long-time opponent of the DCGS system, and criticized its repeated failures. The Pentagon refused to comment on his criticism, however.
Aren't they supposed to end up blaming the intelligence community as they are wont to do?
This may well explain why the US government was so cagey about what happened. It's in fact less damaging to be accused of "war crimes" than to admit that the whole thing was a screw-up because the intelligence system broke down! Now all we need to know is why MSF is being so cagey. They too seem to be hiding something.
Just the same way NORAD was down on 9 eleven…. Down by commission not omission…