Behind the Arlington Cemetery Mess? Sub-Standard Tech
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, July 29 2010
How is it that Arlington National Cemetery could devolve into such a mess? So close to official Washington that you could walk there from Capitol Hill without breaking much of a sweat, it is by design and popular imagination a burial place befitting those who have given military service to the United States. And yet reporters and Army investigators have shown that Arlington National Cemetery is home to hundreds, if not thousands of unmarked graves, urns found in dirt piles, and graves that show up on now official cemetery map.
That's the subject of a Senate hearing happening at this very moment being conducted by the Government Affairs Committee's ad hoc subcommittee on contracting, chaired by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) with Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) as ranking member.
But one thing we already know is that what's happened at Arlington is, at least in part, a failure of technology. Or rather, a failure of cemetery leaders to comprehend that cobbled-together hardware and outdated software went beyond obscure, siloed "technical issues" to have the effect of dishonoring American soldiers.
According to a June report by Army investigators (pdf), for example, Arlington National Cemetery, supposedly the jewel of the national cemetery system, was running IT that would have embarrassed even other government burial places, not to mention private facilities across the country. "When asked about the cemetery's information technology (IT) posture," reads the report, "one ANC leader stated that the cemetery is at a 'one' on a scale of one to five, with five being the best." Modern cemetery practice is to use customized software systems that employ GPS to keep track of burial sites, scheduling tools to track internments and inurnments, ordering features that manage headstone production. Arlington had little of that. And it had no dedicated IT staff responsible for overseeing the system.
The alternative? "This forces Arlington to maintain its present practice of manual record-keeping as its primary means of record-keeping." There's little wonder how things turned out. It's pretty much what they were planning for.
For more background on the chaotic situation at Arlington National Cemetery, check out the on-going reporting that Salon's Mark Benjamin has been doing. And you can watch the Senate committee hearing's live-stream here.