ATEC Assessment

Next Monday's Inside the Army -- available today -- is reporting that while the Army has concerns over how a commercial off-the-shelf analyst tool, made by the California software company Palantir, will work with its own Distributed Common Ground System-Army, the service is not attempting to block the use of Palantir's technology in theater and is working to address how it might be incorporated into the Army's intelligence analysis framework:

At issue is a debate that has erupted in the last year over the extent to which the Army should use Palantir, software designed to track positions of roadside improvised explosive devices, over DCGS-A. The Army last year was accused of preventing units that wanted Palantir from receiving the software in theater and manipulating an Army Test and Evaluation Command operational assessment report about Palantir to downplay the software's performance and criticisms of DCGS-A (Inside the Army, Sept. 3). The Army was cleared of wrongdoing on the ATEC report, according to the results of an investigation -- laid out in an Oct. 17 memo obtained by ITA -- that was ordered by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno.

Service officials last week took pains to explain the Army's position. "We are not fighting Palantir," Maj. Gen. Harold Greene, deputy for acquisition and systems management, told reporters in a Dec. 20 roundtable. "The Army leadership is very clear on what the job of those of us in the acquisition community is and it's to get the best of the breed for our soldiers with the resources that the taxpayers give us."

In working with Palantir software, "we have a concern about the interoperability and we are working to do the best we can to mitigate that challenge," Greene said.

Through a cooperative research and development agreement with Palantir, the Army is exchanging information between Palantir and DCGS-A. "We've had some initial success in the laboratory and we are looking at how we would build upon that. We are looking at how we can make all this work together so we can leverage the goodness that people have seen in Palantir," Greene stated.

We now have the Oct. 17 ATEC assessment (marked "for committee use only//unclassified//FOUO//LIMDIS").

View the full Dec. 24 ITA story.