It appears that the Pentagon is looking at terminating its massive cloud computing project known as Jedi. 

Given that this massive contract has the potential for creating comfortable retirements for dozens of senior officers, I call it back-loaded bribery, something has to be seriously wrong.

It’s got to be worse than the F-35 clusterf%$#, and it doesn’t get much worse than that:

Pentagon officials are considering pulling the plug on the star-crossed JEDI cloud-computing project, which has been mired in litigation from Amazon.com Inc. and faces continuing criticism from lawmakers.

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract was awarded to Microsoft Corp. in 2019 over Amazon, which has contested the award in court ever since.

A federal judge last month refused the Pentagon’s motion to dismiss much of Amazon’s case. A few days later, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said the department would review the project.

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“The prospect of such a lengthy litigation process might bring the future of the JEDI Cloud procurement into question,” the Jan. 28 report said.

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Some lawmakers and government-contracting experts say JEDI should be scuttled because its single-vendor, winner-take-all approach is inappropriate and outmoded for mammoth enterprises like the Department of Defense.

These people say the Pentagon should move to an increasingly popular approach to enterprise cloud-computing that includes multiple companies as participants. Spreading out the work also reduces the risk of legal challenges from excluded companies, they say.

Oh, I see now:  They want to spread the dollars around to get some of the usual suspects into the room, as opposed to Microsoft and Amazon, who have been playing the game far longer than either of them, and they have LOTS if executive vice president positions. 

If you split this up between Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, etc., think about all the retired officers that you can hire.

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A Pentagon inspector general report last year determined that the Pentagon adviser didn’t violate any ethical obligations or give preferential treatment to Amazon.

Steven Schooner, a George Washington University law professor who specializes in government contracting, said early questions about the Pentagon’s underlying procurement strategy for JEDI have grown over time.

“And all of that is before this case became one of the most jaw-dropping, head-scratching collections of conflicts of interest imaginable,” he said.

The US defense procurement system is beyond dysfunctional..