How Amazon’s $10 billion contract squabble with the Pentagon reveals the shady nature of military contracts – IOTW Report

How Amazon’s $10 billion contract squabble with the Pentagon reveals the shady nature of military contracts

BPR: Earlier this month the US Department of Defense (DOD) canceled a $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract awarded to Microsoft in 2019. The goal of the contract was to modernize the Department’s IT operations using cloud computing.

The JEDI cancellation occurred following a lawsuit from Amazon after the company was denied the contract. Amazon alleges that they were rejected because the Department of Defense was pressured by then President Donald Trump to “screw Amazon.” The motivation for this move, it was claimed, was driven by Trump’s personal animus for then-CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.

Amazon claims insider sources responsible for the book Holding The Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis provide evidence for Trump’s direct intent to “screw Amazon,” but you need not trust another book published by Washington insiders for this story. Trump’s personal problems with Bezos, valid or not, are extremely public. Tweets targeted at Bezos’ include:

“The @washingtonpost, which loses a fortune, is owned by @JeffBezos for purposes of keeping taxes down at his no profit company, @amazon.” December 7, 2015.

“If @amazon ever had to pay fair taxes, its stock would crash and it would crumble like a paper bag. The @washingtonpost scam is saving it!” December 7, 2015. read more

2 Comments on How Amazon’s $10 billion contract squabble with the Pentagon reveals the shady nature of military contracts

  1. A few years back, I got an assignment to evaluate processing power on three different analytic platforms for a large government agency:

    1. Servers the agency already owned that were housed and managed at my company.

    2. Cloud based servers from Microsoft Azure.

    3. Cloud based servers from AWS Cloud.

    After extensive testing, the performance rankings were as follows:

    1. Own hardware was a lot faster than the cloud, but the clouds were scalable.

    2. Azure was a lot faster than AWS.

    3. AWS was the slowest.

    Naturally, you can guess what was chosen because it was already decided before I even started testing. They went with AWS. When I quipped that it was probably because no one in Congress wanted to get on Jeff Bezos bad side, I got a stern lecture from my VP not to make such factual statements out loud again at work.

    Our government is 95% bullshit and thievery.

    5

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