DTS: can you kill the undead II: Electric boogaloo

DTS, again. You just can't kill this thing....though we are getting closer.

"It's been a pig," said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs subcommittee on federal financial management, who is trying to kill the travel system contract.

One of the best statements coming out of the Senate this year.

After a decade and more than $500 million in costs, the Defense Department's new travel booking system doesn't work, it doesn't save money, and most staff members don't use it, a new study says.

A Government Accountability Office report released yesterday slams the Northrop Grumman-designed Defense Travel System and calls Pentagon estimates of usage and cost savings into serious question. So poor is the Pentagon's analysis of the system's merits, the report says, that defense officials offered a credit card company news release as sole proof for its claim that the system saves millions of dollars each year.
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The Defense Department has spent more than $500 million on the program since 1998, an overrun of about $200 million, according to figures compiled by Congress from GAO and Defense Department reports.
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The system was born of a 1995 Pentagon task force recommendation to replace the department's outmoded, chaotic travel procedures with one standardized system for booking official travel, from airlines to hotels. But technical problems have foiled efforts to coax employees to use it.

Think about your IT requirements in 1995. Do they matter if 11 years they still are not addressed.....and you are trying to make them work in a 2006 environment? 1995, what was that Windows 95?

Asked for proof that its system would save $31 million yearly in personnel costs, the Pentagon provided a copy of an American Express news release that discussed savings achieved through a completely different booking system, in a private company.

In a written response to the report, Undersecretary of Defense David S.C. Chu strongly objected to criticism of the Pentagon's estimates of personnel cost savings. "The Department is facing an enormous challenge and must successfully prosecute today's war while still making investments that safeguard the future," he wrote.

I'll let Skippy deal with Dr. Chu.

"It's time to close this program down," said Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who chairs the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's investigations panel, which held a hearing last year on the bill.

More Senate sanity.

Hey, $500 million - you might be able to buy a Corvette, errrr, Little Crappy Ship, for that (1 mission module included - when developed). OK, it can't defend itself very well in the Littoral against ASM like the C-802, but that is why the "L" stands for Little.