A couple weeks ago, we saw a highly unusual display of emotion from one of the military’s top officers, testifying on Capitol Hill. Gen. Ray Odierno, the chief of staff of the Army, got very visibly angry during an exchange with Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) during a House Armed Services Commmittee hearing on the 2014 budget. It was part of an ongoing dustup over software that’s used to perform intelligence anayltics in Afghanistan. Hunter has been aggressively advocating for the Army to adopt a proprietary system called Palantir, which, in some ways, competes with the Army’s program of record for intelligence collection and analysis, the Distributed Common Ground System.
David Berteau, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provides some analysis on the heated exchange.