As someone who actually works with these systems...
I think its a major overreaction by Officers that come from the Special Warfare community as well as congressmen who both have a vested interest in forcing the MI Branch (full disclosure: MI is my branch) to do what they want us to. This has alot to do with Army politics in the Army and American civilians, much less British civilians can not possibly understand it. Ive been in the Military Intelligence Branch for my entire Military career, coming up on 12 years, and I can barely understand it. No offense, but you guys have no hope of attempting to understand this.
Anyway, the angle here is that ARSOC (Army Special Operations Command, they run the Rangers, Special Forces, Special Operations Aviation, Civil Affairs, Psychological Operations and their various schools. Basically ARSOC is responsible for everything "Special" besides the Intelligence Support Activity and Delta Force, which are run by the Joint Special Operations Command) uses a system called Palantir, as do the Marines.
Yes, its true that the Army didn't want it, INSCOM, the Intelligence and Security Command was dead set against it. The reason being that It works well for tactical intelligence analysis and collection, but not so much for Strategic/Level Above Corps. Perhaps it could be adapted for it, but having used it, I really doubt it. The one thing it has going for it is that its UI is alot more intuitive and easy to train for than DCGS-A or even the current CGS. The problem is that Congress wont give us the funding for two systems when we really ought to have two, one Strategic, one Tactical.
Anyway, how much did Palantir pay you for this article? Im absolutely serious here too. Palantir astroturfs like crazy, comes up with outright lies, has a team of "journalists" (nameless bloggers mostly, if this was really an issue, Michael Yon would have already been all over it, so would David Axe and UncleJimbo at BlackFive), and have ruined careers of people who support DCGS-A over their system. Its also telling that the congressmen who are investigating are all taking money from Palantir's Super PAC.
DCGS-A is brand new. Its not going to stand up to a fullscale exercise yet. New Military computer systems tend to fall over for years before they work well. A common ground station project as ambitious as this probably wont work as well as it needs to until the end of the decade. The full specification is classified so I really cant go into much detail, but its more ambitious than any of the other "disruptive technology" intelligence collection/analysis systems currently in use or in planning.
This is like someone in the 1970's expecting a Minicomputer to outperform a Mainframe. Its unrealistic and the idiots (read: Politicians) who think they know better than the Intelligence NCOs and Officers, as well as Officers who are not from our branch and have no frame of reference for what they're talking about dictating that they're right to the people who do use this stuff and have careers that could be made or broken by this, not to mention the people that could be killed if one of these systems isnt up to snuff. This isnt a matter of financial cost, its a matter of life and death and I think alot of you are concentrating on the wrong thing here.
Im not saying DCGS-A is perfect, or even a good system (yet), honestly a classified system that both Palantir and DCGS-A are attempting to replicate is much, much better than either. But the Generals and Congressmen don't get their dog and pony show out of an already existing system which could easily be adapted for use in every Brigade and above level unit's S-2 office.
And honestly, the recorded failures were not bad at all for a brand new system under development being stress tested. Think of this as an Alpha build. There are going to be bugs, and alot of them, especially considering that this thing has to be able to integrate about 12 separate networks, their APIs, their encryption, etc. Including extremely robust systems like NSANET and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. Id really like to see a development Palantir system outperform it.