Who is modernizing the Pentagon – and collecting billions of dollars for it? Amazon and Microsoft argued about this for a long time. The deal has been back on the table since the summer. And another candidate is in the starting blocks.
“Sh *** on Amazon” – with this sentence the former US President Donald Trump is said to have made the decision about the billion dollar JEDI program and made Microsoft the winner. After a legal dispute over the decision, the Pentagon is now looking for suitable candidates again. And Google is probably planning to throw its hat in the ring too.
It has been clear since the summer: The JEDI contract will not come about as previously agreed. The aim of the project is to merge the IT systems of the US armed forces and bundle them into a single, state-of-the-art system. The Pentagon announced in July that the measures provided for in the treaties no longer meet modern requirements. The role played by the delay caused by the Amazon trial was not revealed. Under the name Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, one wants to take a different direction and buy technology from several companies instead of relying on a single supplier as before.
Google sees its chance
Google now sees this as its great opportunity, reports the “New York Times”, citing four internal sources at the Internet giant. Although the Pentagon had recently emphasized that only Amazon and Microsoft, as the largest providers of modern cloud systems, would be trusted with the appropriate competence, Google is now trying to convince the US Department of Defense of their own qualities.
The company has been preparing intensively for this since September, according to the report. The project was given a high priority internally in order to be able to pull developers and other staff away from other projects. The company’s cloud boss and high-ranking US military officials are said to have met in the Pentagon on Tuesday.
Long argument about outdated technology
The rethinking of the Pentagon came as a relative surprise in the summer. The attempt to lift the chaotic technological infrastructure of the armed forces on a common platform had been going on for years, 10 billion dollars over ten years had been released for JEDI. Amazon has long been considered the best candidate, the decision for Microsoft came as a surprise in 2018. And ultimately caused further delays due to legal proceedings.
On the part of Amazon, they had one main goal: To prove that Donald Trump’s decision was made out of personal dislike of Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. The Pentagon vehemently denied this, but even the courts did not want to rule out that contemptuous public and private statements by the ex-president had influenced the decision. When the successor administration examined the project at the beginning of the year, it was decided to cancel it in view of the impending further delays.
However, technical considerations also played a role. Although JEDI was about the development of a common tactical platform for Army, Air Force and Navy as well as secret services such as the CIA, the cloud does not seem to have played a major role in the planning so far. The focus on a single provider has also been questioned. While the disputes dragged on, individual parts of the armed forces and the CIA had begun to develop their own cloud systems. Ultimately, a restart was the most attractive option.
Controversial clientele
The fact that Google is re-entering the race as the Pentagon’s service provider is likely to be highly controversial within the group. The company’s last contract with the military apparatus was terminated due to internal disputes. The program, run internally as Project Maven, used artificial intelligence to support the Pentagon in evaluating live images. Google employees feared that this data could be used as a decision-making aid for drone strikes. After protests and layoffs, the company gave in. Project Maven was not renewed and an application for the JEDI contract disappeared in a drawer. Now it’s probably back on the table.
Source From: Stern
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