Briefing Book
Son of Star Wars. The Defense Department plans to spend $6.6 billion over the next six years developing a system to protect the continental United States from ballistic missile attack. Officials say the National Missile Defense System will include a satellite sensor to detect missile launches, an early-warning radar to track flight paths, a ground radar to target missiles and a ground-launched interceptor to destroy them.
Son of Star Wars. The Defense
Department plans to spend $6.6 billion over the next six years developing a system to
protect the continental United States from ballistic missile attack.
Officials say the National Missile Defense System will include a satellite sensor to
detect missile launches, an early-warning radar to track flight paths, a ground radar to
target missiles and a ground-launched interceptor to destroy them.
Although a final decision to deploy the system has not been made, DOD estimates it will
deploy the system by 2005 at the latest.
AMC CIO. The Army Materiel Command has appointed James
Buckner as its new chief information officer.
Buckner, who is a member of the Senior Executive Service, previously was chief
engineering executive for electronic commerce at the Defense Information Systems Agency.
He began his Defense career with the Air Forces Standard Systems Group at Gunter
Annex, Ala., where he was SSGs first engineering director.
Before joining SSG, Buckner worked for McDonnell Douglas Corp. as information systems
director in the companys space systems division.
Bruckner has a masters degree in computer science from the University of Houston.
Air Force IT strategy. The Standard Systems Group this
month will begin replacing its current information technology products and services
contracts with blanket purchasing agreements.
Through the IT Tools 2 program, SSG will replace its indefinite-delivery,
indefinite-quantity contracts with BPAs in five product groups: computer systems,
networking, software and applications, peripheral equipment and services.
For the first round of agreements, SSG will release invitations to bid for desktop PC,
portable PC and peripheral BPAs.
Keeping track. The Standard Systems Group has developed
and implemented a new system to help manage the Air Forces $4 billion hardware and
software inventory.
SSGs Information Processing Management System, which runs under Microsoft
Windows, replaces two legacy systems and will save an estimated $2.2 million in its first
year of use. More than 1,000 equipment control officers at 298 Air Force bases worldwide
use the system to track more than 2 million pieces of hardware and software.
The control officers transmit reports to SSG, which compiles the information for
quarterly reports the Air Force sends to Congress that are used to determine IT budgets.
Gregory Slabodkin
Internet: gslabodkin@gcn.com