“William Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary, has a bit of Steve Jobs envy,” Eric Chabrow reports for GovInfoSecurity.com. “The Pentagon takes 81 months to field a new computer system; Apple Computer took 24 months to develop the iPhone.”
Chabrow reports, “‘That is less time than it takes us to prepare a budget and receive Congressional approval for it,’ Lynn said in his keynote address Tuesday at the RSA 2011 IT security conference in San Francisco. ‘This means I get permission to start a project at the same time Steve Jobs is talking on his new iPhone. It’s not a fair trade. We have to close this gap. Silicon Valley can help us.’
“With Apple and other technology companies in mind, Lynn says the Defense Department is expanding its new Information Technology Exchange Program to promote the exchange of cybersecurity personnel between government and industry,” Chabrow reports. “‘We want senior IT managers in the department to incorporate more commercial practices,’ he says. ‘And we want seasoned industry professionals to experience first-hand the unique challenges we face at DoD.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “krquet” for the heads up.]
Well, I’ll gladly start this one off.
William Lynn III, GET RID OF THE MICROSOFT MONOPOLY WITHIN THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE!
Thanks you.
INTERESTING IDEA! now, let’s see. first we have to appoint a bi-partisan committee to see if this idea is worth forming a non-permanent committee to research the feasibility of doing a study on the impact of such a committee…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Microsoft is not going away. There are people that are totally brainwashed by the Windows culture and they’d have to die off before any non-Microsoft decisions are made. It might happen ten years from now if Apple somehow grabs hold of both consumers and the enterprise, but I’m not holding my breath. IT people swear by Microsoft and Windows and that’s just how it is. Nobody complains about the DOD being unfair about choosing only Microsoft and Windows. Some monopolies are allowed to exist and nothing can be done about it.
Not true.
My agency, FDA, has been Microsoft centric for over a decade. The CIO distributed a memo in 1995 that Apple products would not be supported, and when they distributed a list of approved devices a few years later, no Apples were on that list.
Today, we are completing the distribution of the results of a pilot that built an infrastructure to support, update and patch Macs like we do Windows PCs, and management will decide what level of support for Macs we can afford under current budget restraints.
iPads, iPhones and Macs are common among top level management, and various Centers are currently developing apps for using iPads in field inspections and other mobile tasks.
Macs and other Apple products are here to stay.
When has any government ever been the cheapest and fastest?
Second, Apple defined their problem while the government’s problem is very undefined and overdefined at the same time.
Also, I would rather the USA government approach at Normandy, because it is assured success at a high cost versus unassured success at a low cost.
Sorry to get political here, the high cost you speak of was the blood of mostly Canadian (and British) soldiers. The USA government had few feet on the ground.
D-Day casualties are broken down as follows:
USA = 4,696
Can = 1,204
UK = 2,548
cf: http://warchronicle.com/numbers/WWII/ddaycasualtyest.htm
@googledinTO
Amen, brother!
And where were the Yanks during the Battle of Britain? A scant seven! We were kicking arse and taking names long before you dudes got involved!
=:~)
“And where were you Yanks during the Battle of Britain?”
If Yanks were involved, it wouldn’t have made it the Battle of Britain, would it?
Of course, there is always that refrain of American GI’s in England as being:
Over Sexed! Over Paid! And Over Here!
To which the reply to the Brits was that they were:
Under Sexed! Under Paid! And Under Eisenhower! ; )
America didn’t need to get involved with you warmongering europeans and you’re stupid wars. the only reason we got involved was because we were attacked. Also, you were only in the war from 39 to 41 without the US and USSR, before those two countries entered the war your butts were getting kicked by the Germans
Some fairly offensive comments on here sadly.
In the Battle of Britain we were one small Island nation alone against Germany, Italy and Austria as well as the captured resources of the nations they had invaded. We proudly and bravely withstood that onslaught and the following “Blitz” of bombing on our cities. Apart from Pearl Habour/Harbor and some possessions Americans did not have their homes and factories bombed which undoubtedly makes it much easier to be fully prepared before battle.
I doubt many Americans know that most British city children were separated from their families, being sent to the country for their own safety, destined not to see their families for long periods of time, that basic staples of food and essentials were in very short supply, that people in London regularly slept in the tunnels used for the underground to escape the bombs raining down.
War mongering Europeans?, I think you will find that largely it was one nation that started the two World Wars and that the other nations did little more than defend themselves. When America was doing some war mongering of its own with the USSR and more recently with Iraq and Afghanistan the British stood by your side and at cost. Certainly recently we have been a terrorist target only because we are our closest ally. I do not moan about that, I merely point out that it has hardly been a one way street on support.
To add some recent info uncovered for those interested.
On D-Day, the Allies landed around 156,000 troops in Normandy. The American forces landed numbered 73,000: 23,250 on Utah Beach, 34,250 on Omaha Beach, and 15,500 airborne troops. In the British and Canadian sector, 83,115 troops were landed (61,715 of them British): 24,970 on Gold Beach, 21,400 on Juno Beach, 28,845 on Sword Beach, and 7900 airborne troops.
and also……….
In April and May 1944, the Allied air forces lost nearly 12,000 men and over 2,000 aircraft in operations which paved the way for D-Day.
The Allied casualties figures for D-Day have generally been estimated at 10,000, including 2500 dead. Broken down by nationality, the usual D-Day casualty figures are approximately 2700 British, 946 Canadians, and 6603 Americans. However recent painstaking research by the US National D-Day Memorial Foundation has achieved a more accurate – and much higher – figure for the Allied personnel who were killed on D-Day. They have recorded the names of individual Allied personnel killed on 6 June 1944 in Operation Overlord, and so far they have verified 2499 American D-Day fatalities and 1915 from the other Allied nations, a total of 4414 dead (much higher than the traditional figure of 2500 dead). Further research may mean that these numbers will increase slightly in future. The details of this research will in due course be available on the Foundation’s website at http://www.dday.org.
So the assertion above that American’s were few is number is incorrect, However the British and Canadians had more people on the ground in total and yet had fewer casualties.
The British/US numbers sent actually would have been much higher but a large number were coming from the Africa/Italy direction, indeed Rome fell two days before the Normandy invasion. People tend to forget that we were coming at the Germans from two angles.
What is always disappointing is that every American made WW2 drama that I have seen, downplays the rest of the Allies involvement and gives the impression that they did it by themselves. It causes resentment and unnecessarily so.
The Axis lost mainly because they spread themselves so thinly against too many opponents. The USSR would have been defeated had they been alone, the Americans were fortunate that they were distant from their foes. England is only 23 miles from France at the closest point so the fact we managed to stand alone against the Axis for a period was quite remarkable and something we are rightly proud of.
The US Army had 2 Army Corps (VII & V) assaulting Omaha & Utah beaches on the morning of D-Day. The night before the 101st & 82nd Airborne Divisions were air dropped behind the enemy lines. The US Army Rangers assaulted sheer rock faces under withering German fire in the daylight to take out gun emplacements that endangered the Naval Flotilla out in the Channel and the landing craft.
I was at Normandy for the 40th Anniversary Ceremony and met and talked to men who were on those beaches on that day.know better.
You stand corrected.
while the births and Canadian contribution is overlooked, there was a large American presence in the Normandy D day invasions. keep in mind the US was the only allied power fighting on two fronts, many of our soldiers were in the pacific beating japan where we pretty much won that by ourselves ( british bawling aside, the pacific was vastly, overwhelmingly a US victory)
that Gould be british and canadian, not births
Perhaps we could all agree to just blame the French for losing Normandy (and the rest of their country)
Damn you, National Enquirer!
Yeah, they caught Steve coming from the Cancer Center and tomorrow you’ll have a front row seat watching Apple’s shares plunge, wiping out all recent gain. It’s a bitch, isn’t it.
It’s not just DoD, it’s the entire government that needs to take a strong look at modern business practices, and do some serious restructuring.
Did not the US rejected Ross Perot, Steve Forbs, etc. before? It’s not the will of the people. Well, at least at that time.
Steve Forbes lost in the primaries, not the general election.
Ross Perot ran as an Independent and lost his mind mid-race…
Problem is that the government is not selling, they don’t have to do a good job to have money, they jus increase taxes or make a new war. I like the new focus on being more like a company. Earn your money boys.
They don’t need to “exchange” personnel between government and industry. When the Defense Department needs a new plane or tank or whatever, a contractor bids on the project and builds it to the government’s specification.
If the Defense Department needs something like a new soldier-friendly wearable communication and computing system, they should contract Apple to design and build it. That would be a whole new growth area for Apple. If Apple can get have an agreement to allow use any (non-classified) technology it develops in future “civilian” (consumer) products, that would be even better.
The major problem is that the government comes up with the specification, rather than with the problem statement. If the government went to private industry and simply described the problem and asked for a solution, rather than telling private industry what the solution needs to be, things would get a lot less expensive, and a lot more efficient, very quickly.
Just like Microsoft. It is the retrofitting to legacy systems that causes the problem. They should wibe the slate clean for every new device and cut out the multiplicity of choices in what is the core technology.
Apple is efficient because it uses Apple computers. They’re growing their business through innovative recursion.
People like the ones at Apple are not drawn to government or military work.
Ah m159 – – you need to consider this: MANY of my sailors presently, are like the rest of consumers; throwing out MS Windows and replacing with Macs. Problems arrises using the CAC access to Navy sites. All of our webmail (NMCI) and annual courses need to run on IE8.0. Thus, Parallels or no access. Until the Navy leaves the 90’s behind, myself and my sailors are stuck with this additional cost or inaccessible.
The Chief
NavyTim
Thanks for serving NavyTim! I appreciate all you and your shipmates do. I’m a old 60’s sailor.
Thank You for your service to our nation.
iQ
@navytim – You’re lucky. Most of the Navy PCs that I have to deal with (in various, and changing, locations, if you catch my drift) are running IE 6.0. It’d make my job tremendously easier if they’d run IE 8. And most places running NMCI would likely do better on 56K dialup.
But… There’s no (war) games for Mac.
Why should Silicon Valley give a flying f**k about the “unique challenges we face at DoD”? Yeah, it’s tough coming up with new ways to murder innocent civilians in the Middle East to protect the profits of Big Oil!
And you’re an idiot