US Military WTF
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I think this Daily WTF post accidentally ended up on Ars Technica:
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The wooden table makes a magical appearance:
At each intervening echelon of the chain of command—just as with many bureaucratic processes in the Army—the documents were printed out for staff review, marked up on paper, and then optically scanned to be sent to the next echelon of command. (In my personal experience dealing with Army general officers, the ones I encountered never read e-mail on-screen—they had an administrative assistant print it out and put it in their physical in-box.)
After scanning, the hard copy would generally be shredded—since it often included classified information about operations, as well as personal information about those nominated. As a result, the electronic ghost of the hardcopy became the only archive of the process. And given that in 2010 the Army’s e-mail systems were a fragmented mess, there was no guarantee that anything could ever be recovered from them. Often, units track the status of awards recommendations in desktop databases, spreadsheets, or even PowerPoint charts.
Millions of dollars for advanced weapons systems; and $1.15 for infrastructure.
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Here's another goodie -- assuming that email is a reliable, durable service.
But other than the database entries—which marked Swenson’s award as “complete” but had no date for transmittal to CENTCOM—there was no record of any of that information in USFOR-A’s J-1 office. While one staffer insisted that Swenson’s information had been forwarded to CENTCOM, there was no record of an e-mail being received by CENTCOM’s mailbox.
Another wrinkle in the investigation was that there was no trace, electronic or printed, of the award review—probably because all e-mail records of any awards activity had been lost in 2012. That’s because the messages were stored locally on computers in Outlook .pst files—and those files were deleted off of systems during a 2012 operating system update.
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@DrPepper said:
Millions of dollars for advanced weapons systems; and $1.15 for infrastructure.
But nobody makes a better Ratatouille MRE.
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Ha! This story has everything! A general named McHale and even an Access database! (Why does everyone insist on putting "tracker" in all their Access database names?)
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We have an Access 'application' named Tracker. Just tracker.
My skazillion dollar system has to interface with it, naturally.
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@Weng said:
We have an Access 'application' named Tracker. Just tracker.
My skazillion dollar system has to interface with it, naturally.
AccessApplicationTrackerTrackerTracker
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@Ben L. said:
@Weng said:
We have an Access 'application' named Tracker. Just tracker.
My skazillion dollar system has to interface with it, naturally.
AccessApplicationTrackerTrackerTracker
BinLadenTracker.
I guess that one didn't work so well..
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I just love the title of the PowerPoint shown in the article: "Investigation into the loss of..." As if they are investigating a lost battleship.
