No Spy Software Scandal Here, Army Claims
- 11.30.12
- 5:41 PM
Military analysts look at the Distributed Common Ground System – Army, the service’s core intelligence suite. Photo: U.S. Army.
It had all the trappings of a classic Pentagon scandal: an Army report, mysteriously ordered destroyed; billions of dollars’ worth of military gear; fuming Congressmen; maligned generals; screaming headlines. But the Army has just concluded that this whole flap over competing intelligence systems was the result of a bureaucratic screw-up, not malicious wrongdoing.
Yes, that report was strangely squashed, writes Army Lt. Gen. William Grisoli in a review obtained by Danger Room. The move wasn’t “attributable to anyone attempting to improperly advance” his own agenda, Troy says.
So, scandal over? Not quite, says one of the congressmen at the heart of the affair.
The imbroglio centers around a system called Palantir, which teases out connections from giant mounds of data, and visualizes those links in ways that even knuckle-draggers can understand. With its slick interface and its ability to find hidden relationships, Palantir has attracted a cult of fanboys in the military and intelligence communities not unlike the one Apple has amassed in the consumer gadget world.
The problem is the Army already has a $2.3 billion system that does what Palantir is supposed to do — plus several dozen more things, besides. The DCGS-A (“Distributed Common Ground System – Army”) is meant to be the one resource that Army intel analysts can use to find links between events, build dossiers on high-level targets, and plot out patterns in enemy attacks. Accessing 473 data sources for 75 million reports, it’s supposed to be the primary source for mining intelligence and surveillance data on the battlefield — everything from informants’ tips to satellites’ images to militants’ fingerprints.
It had all the trappings of a classic Pentagon scandal: an Army report, mysteriously ordered destroyed; billions of dollars’ worth of military gear; fuming Congressmen; maligned generals; screaming headlines. But the Army has just concluded that this whole flap over competing intelligence systems was the result of a bureaucratic screw-up, not malicious wrongdoing.
Yes, that report was strangely squashed, writes Army Lt. Gen. William Grisoli in a review obtained by Danger Room. The move wasn’t “attributable to anyone attempting to improperly advance” his own agenda, Troy says.
So, scandal over? Not quite, says one of the congressmen at the heart of the affair.
The imbroglio centers around a system called Palantir, which teases out connections from giant mounds of data, and visualizes those links in ways that even knuckle-draggers can understand. With its slick interface and its ability to find hidden relationships, Palantir has attracted a cult of fanboys in the military and intelligence communities not unlike the one Apple has amassed in the consumer gadget world.
The problem is the Army already has a $2.3 billion system that does what Palantir is supposed to do — plus several dozen more things, besides. The DCGS-A (“Distributed Common Ground System – Army”) is meant to be the one resource that Army intel analysts can use to find links between events, build dossiers on high-level targets, and plot out patterns in enemy attacks. Accessing 473 data sources for 75 million reports, it’s supposed to be the primary source for mining intelligence and surveillance data on the battlefield — everything from informants’ tips to satellites’ images to militants’ fingerprints.
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