Don't you think...
That a service vital to a country's security should have its IT systems based on sound practice, not on the current fad?
The US Department of the Navy is slashing server spending as of last week, with Vice Admiral David Dorsett, deputy chief of naval operations for information dominance (how's that for a title?), issuing a directive for all IT operations to get their act together and start virtualizing and consolidating servers and data centers to …
...sounds like a sound business practice to me. Moving away from storage-capable machines helps remove a number of potential security breaches in a security-oriented environment. Simplifying the leaves of the network tree makes repair jobs simpler (just have a few spare devices handy). Increased virtualization (already seen in the commercial world) smacks of better utilizing existing hardware: almost always a Good Thing.
Not saying this is the be-all end-all, but they're steps in the right direction.
Changing one set of risks for another, which is probably not so easily controlled.
By all means, though, put stuff on desks that doesn't have local storage, or USB ports, etc. All that has been done long since: at the low end they were called dumb terminals, and the high end they were called X servers.
Actually, I *really* think that all sensitive data should be on a laptop on the back seat of a parked car.
An almost direct implementation of the EPA report to congress on data cent(er) energy efficiency to me. Not that that is a bad thing, just odd to see a bit of government doing something sensible for once, except for the dumass thin client fad du jour of course. Perhaps that is how the pork is being maintained, all the vendors get to put their hands in the taxpayers pockets for the thin client "upgrade".
"...except for the dumass thin client fad du jour of course".
Using technology that can trace its ancestry back to the IBM3270 and the DEC VT52/241 seems like a good idea to me. I *liked* VT220 terminals. I would have thought that new slim and energy efficient colour flatscreen displays offering central management would be very useful in mission critical and harsh environments like the Navy.
It might cut down on the number of PowerPoint presentations out there too...