As the title generally says, I have had an extremely good experience with the Army and IT. Before you write this off as a "party" line, I honestly couldn't care who reads it, everyone that knows me knows this is how I feel. I started out (and still am) an 11C.. for the non-mil folk out there, I'm an Infantry grunt that knows how to fire a mortar system. But I got a degree in Electrical Engineering before working for the gov. Someone had to pay for it, right? I got into a really cool program in the Guard that lets me do infantry stuff on the weekends and two weeks during the summer (which, btw, is BS.... I get to go to The Sandbox for a year) but get paid as a DoD civilian, GS Scale with incentive pay, 9-5 monday-friday. It's a good chunk of change, only about 10-15K under going rate for a well trained security guru, but the bennies are great. Good insurance, retirement, alternate work schedules, get to pick new projects, involved in funding streams, etc.
My education was a much more professional one... my degree got the whole 74B garbage waived, and I go to some really cool black-hat type hacker schools, SANS training, Cisco schools, etc. I needed to brush up on Perl, so I dug into my budget, asked the boss, he was cool with it and I went. That easy. We have CCIE's, MSCEs, CCNEs, EMC Certified Engys, and even a guy with an Oracle Master's. I make sure I send as many people to training every year as I can, especially to places like D.C., Vegas, San Luis Obispo and make sure they have all the amenities. Makes everyone happy.
As far as the IT environment goes, it's hostile. Period. I'm responsible for the security on over 2400 nodes, and our IT shop is small with assets spread out over an entire state. It's a constant battle, and there are figurative bullets flying at us from every direction. If it's not the latest MS security hole, it's foreign interests trying to hack. But I like this. My job is never boring, and very fluid... in 4 years I haven't done the same thing in two days straight. I've got a decent manager, and everytime we get a new position funded, it gets filled in a matter of days, almost always with a really qualified person in it for the bennies.
IT decisions, on the other hand, are often boneheaded, pushed from the top down by people who don't know what they're doing and lock us into contracts that are inflexible and software or hardware is obsolete by the time we get it.
But, that's changing. New purchasing procedures let us choose best value for the buck, not lowest price. So now we buy Dell servers instead of having JoeBob Inc.'s servers shoved down our throats. Requiring EAL Compliance on everything we buy means that we're not going to get stuck with some fly-by-night company's product in a contract, when the company folds before the contract is fulfilled (Gain Systems, anyone?). If the product got EAL conformance, at least the company has enough cashflow to get it evaluated. We have a framework, caled the JTA-A (Joint Tactical Architecture - Army) which we must operate in, but that's a wide boundary and lets me pick some very cool projects at a whim, and start some pilot projects with new technology which get funded if they pan out. Because of our ability to bring in other military personnel as needed, as well as a very defined chain of command, we can and have reacted very quickly to threats in the security arena. For instance, we patched up almost 1500 windows systems for Blaster only three days after the warning came out. September 11 was the biggest trial by fire, we had over $1 mil of working telecom and data equipment with operators at WTC less than three hours after the first strike.
The only real issue I have is the budgeting process. We get X dollars every year allotted to us, which is nowhere near enough to run the shop efficiently, but suddenly in September we get an influx of cashflow in the million dollar range. So you put together quotes for everything that broke during the year, everything that will break, and all new stuff and buy it then. Not that bad, except if your Core router dies in January, you may not have cash until the next quarter in May. Sometimes we can't even buy a stick of memory, but can close a contract on 150 new laptops. It gets confusing.
The Army is also transforming, by getting rid of a lot of 74Bs that ran networks and replacing them with contractors. Right now we need more trigger pullers. The future of military IT as I see it puts most of the work on contractors like EDS, SRA and SAIC. C'est la Guerre.
For those of you out there considering something like this, I would seriously recommend going to College and using the military to pay for it. Most states' National Guard will give you 100% to a state school, and there's always ROTC scholarships. Active duty programs exist that will send you to get a four year degree if you come back and serve for a term (usually 3, 4, or 6 years, depending on the degree). Either serve your time and become a contractor, or use the gov to pursue higher ed, like the NSA program that will give you your Master's degree in CS, for free, from places like Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Stanford if you go work for the gov for four years.
Anyway, that's what I think I thought.
