I was tangentially involved with DCGS-A - I worked on the DoDAF 'architecture' for it, porting the documentation from the purpose-built views of DoDAF 1.x to th

I was tangentially involved with DCGS-A - I worked on the DoDAF 'architecture' for it, porting the documentation from the purpose-built views of DoDAF 1.x to the UML models of DoDAF 2.0, mostly in an automated fashion using some hacky VBA code I wrote to recreate the existing diagrams in the the newest and shiniest version of IBM's Rational System Architect. DCGS is everything that is wrong with government, and with the Army in particular. Stakeholders of existing systems demand to be stakeholders in the new system, and because stake demands input, committees at every level make recommendations. It is a monstrosity, trying to tie together systems which have no business communicating with one another, and all the systems' owners would rather that everyone else change than that they change. Furthermore, the existing systems DCGS was supposed to combine were of the caliber you'd expect from government contractors in a pre-18F world. A friend of mine from left the contract, and became a trainer for Palantir. The Marine Corps used Palantir's offering instead of something DCGS-like in Afghanistan. It was easier to use, less buggy, and therefore more useful despite having an ostensibly smaller feature set. Of course, every contractor and GS employee had brilliant ideas, and we pretended to have insight, and of course "the Army should just buy Palantir" was a general murmur among people who couldn't make the decisions. I think this is probably good news, in terms of the Army actually getting something useful. I'm not totally sold on the whole panopticon technology thing in general or on Palantir specifically, but it's at least less wasteful than continuing to flush money down the toilet that is DCGS.