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Venus and Mars have always misunderstood each other. A top official with the Defense Information Systems Agency seems to think the Pentagon and telecommunications vendors suffer from the same relationship roadblocks when it comes to network-centric warfare.

Defense has preached the netcentric warfare concept for years, backed by terabytes of PowerPoint presentations, but telecom vendors seem to have missed the message (or maybe they fell asleep during the slide shows), according to Tony Montemarano, DISA's component acquisition executive.

Montemarano said, as far as he can determine, vendors don't want to talk the netcentric talk, let alone walk the talk. "I get the idea you are not interested," he bluntly told the annual Federal Networks conference (sponsored by Telestrategies and Suss Consulting) recently. Maybe vendors just aren't that into netcentric warfare? It is so much easier and profitable to sell point-to-point circuits, but it sounds like Montemarano is not buying.

He also hit on a real vendor sore point: DISA's $860 million acquisition a few years back of its own high-speed fiber-optic core network in the United States know as the Global Information Grid Bandwidth Expansion program. Practically every vendor I know that can string wire has groused about this project, saying they could have done it better and cheaper.

But Montemarano said vendors -- in spite of their ululating -- ended up with a whole mess of money from GIG-BE: $850 million out of the total $860 million price tag. At the same time, by buying and operating its own domestic fiber-optic core, DISA has saved more than $40 million on GIG-BE, which fully launched in December 2005.

Sounds like Montemarano wants vendors to stop whining and sell him what he needs instead of what they want.

Name Game

No, it's not a military variation on the age-old board game, but the acronym that reflects the new name for the Army Small Computer Program. Gary Winkler, the Army program executive officer for the enterprise information systems, said the former name does not accurately reflect the program's mission. ASCP buys all kinds of computer gadgets, gizmos and software for the Army; hence, the plan to change the ASCP moniker to Computer Hardware and Enterprise Software Solutions, or CHESS.

I love the acronym, but think Winkler needs to work on the name, which is not exactly zippy.

Testing: One, Two...

Who wants to take two final exams on the same subject? That's the situation network equipment vendors are confronting when they want to have a product certified for use on Army networks, according to a vendor at the Federal Networks Conference.

The vendor asked Winkler why companies must send their gear for testing at DISA's Joint Interoperability Test Command at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., and then on to an Army test center for additional testing and certification. Winkler agreed that such dual testing doesn't make any sense and ultimately costs the Army and DISA. He pledged to work on ending the duplicative testing.

The Bunsen burners used by both the Army and DISA labs probably will save Winkler a lot of money on gas.

Radio Frequency

The Army launched in January its $75 million procurement for new passive radio frequency identification tags and readers. The Army uses the readers and tags to track supplies packed in cases and on pallets, which are sent worldwide. But the Army decided to drop a requirement that vendors provide it and Defense Department end-users with handheld readers capable of working with both long-range powered tags and short-range unpowered tags.

The Army had the dual active/passive reader requirement in its draft RFID procurement specifications released in August 2007, but scrapped them when the final request for proposal came out in January. It appears the Army listened to vendors that said the dual-reader requirement would increase costs, since such gizmos don't exist in the commercial world.

Winkler said the enterprise information systems office plans to run a separate active RFID procurement later this year, with the first solicitation documents to be released next month. This competition should be really interesting as Savi Technology, owned by Lockheed Martin, has had a lock on the Defense active RFID market since 1994. In February, the Army boosted the contract ceiling by about $60 million for a total of $483 million.

Winkler told conference attendees that he did not have a value for the new active RFID procurement, but the worth of Savi's current contract indicated the value of the active contract should be more lucrative than the passive contract. Savi also likely will face competition this time from companies such as Axcess International, Parelec and Wavetrend.

Web Talk

I'm moderating a webinar (my first, which is pretty good for a guy who started in this biz 36 years ago feeding copy to teletype operators at Reuters) at 2 p.m. (EST) on Wednesday, Feb. 27 with Lt. Col. Edward Clayson, product manager for the Army's Medical Communications for Combat Casualty Care (MC4) shop. The outfit fields computers and software to medical teams operating in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If you'd like to tune in, please register here.

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