NMCI is the worst thing to happen to the Navy (in my opinion). When I was in the Navy, we managed our own servers and infrastructure on a 1000-workstation aircr

NMCI is the worst thing to happen to the Navy (in my opinion). When I was in the Navy, we managed our own servers and infrastructure on a 1000-workstation aircraft carrier network, including HP-UX/Sybase servers, multiple domain controllers, Exchange servers, rotating tape backups, and Alcatel backbone switches. We only called contractors when we couldn't figure out a problem (which was pretty rare with the team we had). We set up our own network security monitoring and router ACLs, even though we were not authorized to do so, since we were going into a combat zone (Operation Enduring Freedom) and damn the procedures when your ship is at stake. We had it running so tight that when our battlegroup did penetration testing before deployment, they accused us of cheating because they couldn't get in (even though they had a hole poked in the NOC firewall for them and we weren't supposed to have an incoming ACL on our side). NMCI rolled out a few months after I got out of the Navy, and ever since then all I've seen coming out of there since then is hugely incompetent ITs who don't even know what the OSI model is, let alone how to put together a disaster recovery plan or manage network security. All they know how to do is put in a trouble ticket when someone can't send an attachment or they see "NTLDR is missing". I joined the Navy to get the kind of experience that I did, and I feel terrible for the thousands of ITs in there now who have their hands tied for anything harder than resetting someone's password.