From DefenseOne, August 20:
The battle for the Defense Department’s $10 billion war cloud is getting a lot more interesting.
As some of the biggest U.S. technology companies have lined up to bid
on the $10 billion contract to create a massive Pentagon cloud
computing network, the behind-the-scenes war to win it has turned ugly.
In the past several months, a private investigative firm has been
shopping around to Washington reporters a 100-plus-page dossier raising
the specter of corruption on the part of senior Defense Department and
private company officials in the competition for the JEDI cloud contract. But at least some of the dossier’s conclusions do not stand up to close scrutiny.
The dossier insinuates that a top aide to Defense Secretary Jim
Mattis worked with Mattis and others to steer the contracting process to
favor Amazon Web Services, or AWS — and enrich the aide. The aim of the dossier seems clear: to prevent the deal from going solely to AWS, the odds-on favorite in part because it operates the CIA’s classified commercial cloud. Far less clear, however, is who backed its creation and distribution.
It’s an unusually hardball form of backroom maneuvering in the world
of lucrative but rigidly controlled defense contracting. The firm that
prepared the dossier, RosettiStarr, shopped it to various Washington reporters earlier this year. Defense One was given a copy in May. At the time, RossettiStar President and CEO Rich Rosetti declined to reveal who funded the firm’s efforts.
Former defense officials told Defense One they received inquiries about the allegations from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Reuters, and the Intercept. For months, the accusations went unaired by news outlets, including Defense One and Nextgov, sister publications in Atlantic Media’s Government Executive Media Group.
But in the past few weeks, some of the information in the dossier has
surfaced in various publications. Now that the dossier’s targets have
been publicly accused, they are speaking out. In exclusive interviews
with Defense One and Nextgov, they vehemently deny any wrongdoing and seek to turn the spotlight on their mysterious accusers.
A Contract and an Alleged Conspiracy
It’s hard to overstate the significance of the Pentagon’s cloud contract. Known as JEDI,
for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, it will help reshape
American warfare by absorbing, processing, and analyzing intelligence,
sensor, and troop data, and by facilitating communications through the
Defense Department’s worldwide network. The winner of the contract,
should they meet stringent security and performance standards, will
emerge as a front-runner for more huge cloud jobs across the government.
In June, some of the same information included in the RosettiStarr dossier appeared in a report by Capitol Forum, a private company that says it provides “investigative news & analysis on how policy affects market competition” to its paying subscribers. And in the last two weeks, similar information appeared in articles in Reuters, Vanity Fair, and the Daily Caller.
All
of the reports highlight Sally Donnelly, whose consulting firm worked
for Amazon Web Services before she served as senior advisor to the
secretary of defense, essentially Mattis’ right hand, during his first
year on the job. They raise questions about whether she received
payments from AWS for steering the Defense Department to custom-tailor the JEDI requirements.
Donnelly, Pentagon officials, and AWS representatives deny all of it....
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MUCH MORE
