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DOD is poised to get nearly $740 bil- lion in fiscal 2022, and investments in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and general IT are expected to rise in future years. Furthermore, technology is not the issue. JEDI contenders Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM have long offered robust cloud ser- vices, and myriad small and midsize companies are creating new products and improving them every day.
Still, DOD continues to struggle to buy the technology it needs. The prob- lem has given rise to numerous con- gressional hearings to discuss reforming
the budget and acquisition processes, policy papers on the Pentagon’s valley of death (the gap between industry’s development of an innovative technol- ogy and DOD’s deployment of it) and watchdog reports that note where DOD is falling short in its attempts to quickly buy, fund, develop or field software.
The budget balancing act
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who was co-chairman of the House Armed Ser- vices Committee’s Future of Defense Task Force, said the government will “agonize for months and years over
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