Some of us have been around long enough to recall the doomed Desert One mission to rescue the U.S. hostages held by Iran in 1980. That’s where eight U.S. troops died in the middle of the Iranian desert, their bodies abandoned in the survivors’ rush to leave. They perished in a night-time ground collision between two U.S. aircraft at a refueling stop. It was a bleak day in Washington, and it led to the creation of the U.S. Special Operations Command by Congress over the Pentagon’s objections. Lawmakers acted because it seemed clear that the military services involved in the rescue attempt — that would be the Air Force, the Army, the Marines and the Navy — were too bureaucratic and couldn’t work together on such daring missions.
But an $84.9 million contract awarded today by that very same Special Ops command should give us cause for pause:
The contractor will assist the government in performing the daily operations necessary to facilitate USSOCOM’s ongoing ability to effectively and efficiently optimize delivery and performance of distributed computing management services to sustain and maintain USSOCOM’s global enterprise information technology distributed computing environment.
Thank God the snake eaters haven’t become too bureaucratic.
