I am the lead contractor at one of the NavSea R&D sites - I have been running the network (4500 users/8+ sites) for 3 years now. Our 5 Yr. contract costs the Navy 18 Million Dollars. One year of NMCI is going to cost about the same amount... Some savings..

In my opinion some upper echelon Navy people have signed off on this without understanding the realities, and now that they are 150,000 seats behind on deployment, they don't want to have their career's ruined, so they are fighting tooth and nail to get it done, regardless of the cost. They want everyone in the Navy on the same page.. Fine: create standards, force compliance, don't rip out our fiber to the desktop infrastructure that we have just put in place, and replace it with CAT5E.

Network topology does not matter. Novell -- Microsoft we can make it work. We have been running NT4 multi domain for many years now.. NOT A PROBLEM..

However, do we really want to TESTBED Microsoft's latest NOS on our nations military... Our protector's... Mission Critical stuff using unproven software??

Oh Well, Like a friend of mine says about government work: " there is always time to do it over, never enough time to do it right "