By all means, let’s keep increasing the Defense budget, especially when it’s spent so wisely and effectively:

“The Army’s $2.7 billion computing system designed to share real-time intelligence with troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq has hurt, rather than helped, efforts to fight insurgents because it doesn’t work properly, several analysts who have used the system say.

The analysts’ comments mirror concerns raised by the top military intelligence officer in Afghanistan and members of Congress over the past two years in an unsuccessful bid to get the Army to consider alternatives to its portion of the military’s Distributed Common Ground System, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.

…[A]nalysts say DCGS-A was unable to perform simple analytical tasks. The system’s search tool made finding the reports difficult, and the software used to map the information was not compatible with the search software.

“You couldn’t share the data,” said one former Army intelligence officer who worked in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There were also problems with the hardware, with the system being prone to crashes and frequently going off-line, he and another former Army intelligence officer now working as a contractor in Afghanistan said.

“The laptops are turned on, but it doesn’t work,” the second former officer said. “There’s a lot of bugs in the workflow.”

What happened to this?

“President Barack Obama asked Congress to approve a record $708 billion in defense spending for fiscal 2011, but vowed to continue his drive to eliminate unnecessary, wasteful weapons programs.”

…”Even though the Department of Defense is exempt from the budget freeze, it’s not exempt from budget common sense,” Obama told reporters at the White House.”