Shuvu Shel HaJEDI or American Woman

The Pentagon announced Friday that it has awarded its $10 billion “war cloud” computing contract to Microsoft over rival Amazon. On Pentagon news, President Trump and VP Mike Pence are championing “Space Forces”. The announcement from the Department of Defense (DOD) marked a surprising turn of events, following months of Amazon being viewed as the favorite to win the contract amid an increasingly political lobbying battle. The Pentagon said that awarding Microsoft the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, or JEDI, “continues our strategy of a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment,” adding that “the department’s needs are diverse and cannot be met by any single supplier.” “Today, the Department of Defense has taken another step forward in the implementation of our Cloud Strategy with the award of an enterprise general-purpose cloud contract to Microsoft,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “This contract will address critical and urgent unmet warfighter requirements for modern cloud infrastructure at all three classification levels delivered out to the tactical edge.” The JEDI contract will allow Microsoft to develop cloud-computing infrastructure for the U.S. military for up to 10 years, ending in October 2029, though it begins at only two. For months, analysts and experts said Amazon was the obvious frontrunner for the highly-contested contract because its lucrative cloud-computing arm, Amazon Web Services, is likely best-equipped to meet the standards necessary to store the DOD’s top-secret and classified data.

As the Trump administration increasingly beats its cyberwar drum, some former national security officials and analysts warn that even threatening that sort of attack could do far more to escalate a coming cyberwar than to deter it. But the intense political battle around the JEDI contract turned up a notch in July, when President Trump called on the DOD to look “very closely” at whether the contract was written specifically for Amazon. “I’m getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon,” Trump said at the time. “They’re saying it wasn’t competitively bid.” Shortly after, the newly-appointed Pentagon chief Mark Esper ordered a review into the contract, which had delayed the award of JEDI for several months. Earlier this week, Esper recused himself from the process due to his son’s employment with one of the companies that sought the deal.

The Hill – BY EMILY BIRNBAUM AND JESSE BYRNES – 10/25/19 07:12 PM EDT