Hamre Briefing on DoD Planning for the Y2K Rollover

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Too lenghty to paste...

www.usia.gov/cgi-bin/washfile/display.pl?p=/products/washfile/latest&f=99121605.tlt&t=/products/washfile/newsitem.shtml

-- Roland (nottelling@nowhere.com), December 17, 1999

Answers

A fun snippet. I almost feel sorry for the guy...

"I am going to talk to you about, first of all, the mission-critical systems. These are the systems where, if there were failure in any one of them, we would not be able to execute our mission, or we would have serious disruption. All together we had 2,101 of these systems throughout the department. Eighteen months ago, we only had 566 of them ready and fixed.

And this red line shows you the progress we made. As of yesterday, we had only two that were not ready. We actually had three, but the third one got fixed yesterday. It was for the M1 tank. And all tanks had been fitted except for one that was in overhaul, and we dropped the turret back yesterday and put in the tapes, and it's ready.

The two that are remaining, they're both at -- I think the next chart actually shows -- yeah, these two systems, these are both intelligence related. They're at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Both of these are internal systems. They're used to schedule the work product of the other systems. They don't touch the public in any way. And by public, I mean our war fighters. So it doesn't -- and these we were able to book their work for the next six months, and that's all been prepositioned. So anything that we need to do with these two systems has already been in the can, as it were, and will be operational for the next six months. And they're scheduled to be fixed in January. So we don't think we have a problem at all. Those are the last two that are remaining.

Okay. I should say we've got about 5,500 non-mission-critical systems, and those are ones where if it fails, you know, you have to go back to some other method. You know, largely they're bookkeeping things, things of that nature. And we have about 10 of those that will not be fixed. But those aren't anything we're really worried about.

Okay. So we're ready, and there is -- every one of our war-fighting missions we are ready to undertake, and we're not going to -- and I'll have Admiral Willard speak briefly about the testing that we've undertaken. All of our nuclear systems, all of our nuclear systems are ready. And that's everything from custody of nuclear weapons to the early warning systems to the positive command and control systems. Everything is ready and has been tested.

These are what are called the high-impact programs, but that's where we touch lots of Americans. And, for example, our military hospitals, every one of the 300,000 items of equipment and supplies that we use in our military hospitals have been checked. We have also gone back and our health care folks have gone back to the suppliers. We've moved to what's called direct vendor delivery, where we no longer have warehouses that stock medicines, for example. We buy them for what we need the next day. And so we've had to go back into the supply system and from the vendors to make sure the vendors are ready, and we're confident that we're ready for that.

Our retiring annuitant pay is another one, but all of our payroll systems have been checked. And in this case what we've done as a check is from the first sergeant in a company filling out a leave and earnings statement thing, to DFAS, to the Federal Reserve, to the Treasury Fed, to the bank, to the individual bank and the allotment. And we've tracked it through that whole string multiple times to make sure we'll be okay. And we've actually pre-positioned some payroll tapes just in case, as a backup. But we'll be all right. People willget paid.

Let me, if I may, rather than my speaking to the end-to-end testing, I'd like to ask Admiral Willard if he would join me, as well as to talk about the contingency plans in the command centers. So, Admiral Willard, would you --

-- Roland (nottelling@nowhere.com), December 17, 1999.


HAMRE: Well, good morning to everybody.

We're ready. And I'll give you a bit of a highlight about what we have done.

We had our last session yesterday with the department. We meet on a monthly basis. We have -- every one of the defense services, as well as the defense agencies -- that meet on a monthly basis. We do this with the DOD IG present and with the General Accounting Office present. We have representatives from each of the oversight committees from Congress. And every one of them has been hearing the same thing now for the last six months.

And we're ready. We anticipate absolutely no problems in the Department of Defense. And we will talk about what we have done. And I will also ask to have Admiral Willard, who is with the Joint Staff, who has been spearheading the work of the Joint Staff, to speak briefly to you about what they have been doing, because this is a war-fighting issue for us. This isn't a computer geek issue; this is a war-fighting issue.

As we said before, rarely does a military organization know precisely the time and the date and the place when the enemy will attack. In this case, we did. And we had 18 months to get ready, and we're ready.

-- the Virginian (1@1.com), December 17, 1999.


Get a load of this...

"DR. HAMRE: Where you are likely -- where we are likely to see failure around the world, it's going to be in the -- in kind of the classic infrastructure -- power, water, waste water, things of that nature. And there it's directly related to how mechanized and automated the control systems are. Most countries still have manual intervention for most of their infrastructure. And manual intervention is going to be fine, and they'll find ways to work around that. It's probably places, like the United States, where things are so automated we have forgotten how to do it, you know, by hand, that are going to have problems."

-- Roland (nottelling@nowhere.com), December 17, 1999.


I highly suggest reading the entire transcript...some very interesting statements.

R.

-- Roland (nottelling@nowhere.com), December 17, 1999.


Like so many agencies and businesses around the world, their astounding progress makes me feel tremendously excited about the progress that the "science" of software has made in 1999.

Just imagine (yes, imagination helps):

Departments like the DOD were forecasted to finish their mission- critical systems some YEARS after 2000 when they were first inventoried. Now, not only have they finished their mission-critical systems in time, but also nearly all their other ones as well.

One small step for programmers, one giant leap for mankind ... !

And here I thought that Y2K was a problem. Boy, was I wrong.

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), December 17, 1999.



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