July 13, 2015

Disgraceful Government Waste

I recently read that the U.S. Navy is still using Windows XP -- now 14 years old and defunct -- and it is paying Microsoft $9 million a year to keep supporting it. The Navy’s contract contains options to extend the deal into 2017 which means the Navy will pay nearly $31 million for support of an obsolete operating system.

This is outrageous! I was in the Navy for most of the 1960’s and served with some of the smartest, most dedicated people on the planet. We were trained to operate and maintain a Nuclear Power Plant in Antarctica during the 9 months of the year Antarctica was completely isolated from the rest of the world. Not only did we accomplish our mission, we broke the U.S. record for uninterrupted power generation of a Nuclear Power Plant at that time.

Now I’m being told that the Navy I loved and served does not have people smart enough to upgrade PC’s to use the latest Operating System S/W. Utter Nonsense!

The Navy is paying a contractor millions of our dollars and it has nothing to do with Navy staff’s technical expertise and everything to do with enriching others at the expense of the rest of us. I fully realize that this waste of our money pales in comparison to the $Billions being wasted, but this is particularly insulting to those who now serve along with tens of millions of us veterans.

Shame on Navy administrators, Government employees and our Representatives in Congress for allowing this kind of thing to happen. They should all be fired!

Rex A. Hoover
Sumerduck

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- The Navy awarded Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services (HPES) a firm-fixed-price award fee contract for the Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) June 27.

The amount awarded to HPES, based in Herndon, Va., is $321,689,010. The contract includes four, one-year options, which if exercised, has the potential overall contract value of $3,454,735,513. If all options are exercised, work will continue through June 2018.

Boeing reported spending more than $15 million on lobbying in 2013 to lead the way, followed by Lockheed Martin ($14.4 million) and United Technologies Corp. ($13.6 million).