Top DoD officials concede NMCI woes on Hill - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Top DoD officials concede NMCI woes on Hill

The Defense Department’s top two information technology leaders — Assistant Defense Secretary John Grimes and Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Croom, Defense Information Systems Agency director — conceded that the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet still has troubles.

The intranet, known as NMCI, was cited during a March 28 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee’s Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee.

Under questioning by Rep. Adam Smith, D.-Wash., the subcommittee chairman, about “what have we learned” from the implementation of NMCI, Grimes said a lack of user participation in the design of the network, which connects thousands of Navy and Marine Corps users worldwide, was a problem.

“What I’ve found over the past year in this job, out visiting, was that the user was not brought in when they were developing the system,” he said. “When the system was delivered, they never anticipated the number of applications that they would have to run.”

It was believed the contractor would encounter 5,000 different computer applications, he said, but the final number mushroomed to 14,000 to 15,000. Grimes also said the “front-end work wasn’t very well documented,” which led to contractor EDS having a problem “selling seats” on the NMCI network, which was where they expected to make money.

At the same time, Grimes said, “I think part of it was the way we stated the requirements” of the NMCI acquisition. The Navy “had not addressed the interface with the classified networks, which Navy has to get back to — [and it] hasn’t been totally fixed.”

Croom said that while it was “easy to Monday-morning quarterback” a project as vast as NMCI, where 15,000 different networks were joined together, a way to avoid problems in the future is to “chop that problem up into smaller chunks, prototype and test [it] before delivering larger chunks.”

The NMCI discussion was part of a cordial, if not genial, 90-minute session in which the subcommittee ostensibly weighed the DoD’s $31.5 billion 2008 IT budget. However, while there were some pointed questioning on various aspects of IT acquisitions and network security, Smith and the other subcommittee members appeared united in their approval of the Pentagon’s overall IT activities.

“I do believe you gentlemen are doing a very good job,” Smith said at the conclusion of the hearing., though he had earlier said the department must “coordinate these investments to make sure the systems are interoperable, that we are not duplicating other investments and that we have streamlined systems that will not require overly burdensome maintenance over the long term.”

Asked by Smith if there were ways to help empower DoD to streamline IT purchases, neither defense official asked for legislative help.

Instead, Croom pointed to his “adopt-before-we-buy” and “buy-before-we-create” concepts as ways to meet needs.

“If another [DoD] organization has developed or acquired a capability or service that either fits or is close to fitting a need we have, we adopt it,” Croom said.

“We look at everything from an enterprise [perspective],” Grimes added. “Gen. Croom’s focus is on things that will function in a joint [services] environment.”

This means that DISA tests items which the services wish to attach to the network since “anybody in the joint arena that wants to get on our networks has to be certified,” he added.

Much of the discussion at the hearing was about keeping the networks safe, which both Grimes and Croom insisted were top priorities for DoD overall as well as for DISA.

While there have been spikes in external attacks on the “public” DoD networks, Croom said, these are being deflected in large measure because of the use of a Common Access Card, which must be inserted in a card reader at a workstation or on a laptop, along with a personal identification number, to permit a user access to the network.

Asked by Rep. Mike Thornberry, R-Tex., about DoD’s role in providing security support to the commercial networks that help carry the department’s Internet traffic, Grimes said that part of that responsibility had been with DISA in the past, supporting the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, but now rests with the Department of Homeland Security.