Whoopsy daisy. Two days ago, the Department of Defense announced that it had awarded British defense conglomerate BAE Systems (BAES.Y -2.50%) a modest-sized contract to do a bit of work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Under the contract, BAE was expected to support DARPA's "Insight" program, which is developing "an adaptable, integrated human-machine exploitation and resource management system." That's all a bit ambiguous. Further examination of DARPA's own description of the program, however, makes it clear that what Insight really is, is a project to do real-time data mining on massive amounts of intelligence and sensor data, then collate that information so that it is "readily discoverable, accessible, meaningful and useful" to Pentagon analysts.
If that sounds like a rather tall order to pay for with a mere $29 million, though... well, it is. Turns out, the Pentagon misplaced a few decimals in calculating the size of this award, and the contract is actually going to be worth $79 million to BAE -- nearly three times as big as originally suggested. The Pentagon published the new, corrected figure Thursday.
