This is an atrocious strategy. The Army is essentially contracting out their entire IT strategy. There is no level of oversight or incentive structure that will help an organization police such an ill defined contract.
It should be like combat engineering where it’s a set of technical skills they train and develop to solve the problems they encounter. They don’t hire an engineering firm when they need to cross a river.
With drones everywhere one could build up a 3D photogrammetric map of the front. Image recognition and motion extraction could track individual soldiers. Mobile phones and satellite uplink could be used to track the status of every friendly individual.
You could turn the fog of war into a top-down strategy game.
I wonder how forward-thinking this mega contract is…
Unlimited budget, no schedule, no accountability.
I don't suppose this contract pushed for auditable and trackable public open source software where possible? In order to minimize costs, maximize associated software benefits elsewhere in the economy?
Yeah, probably Microsoft and Oracle through the wazoo.