U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a stinging critique of the Defense Department’s IT systems and said he sees much room for improvement.

Cartwright, who was speaking at the FOSE information technology conference in Washington,DC, said the DOD is sending increasing amounts of data, such as video, to soldiers on the battlefield, and it’s beginning to build an architecture “that starts to take us where we need to be.” But Cartwright quickly tempered that.

“Quite frankly, my feeling is — at least being a never-satisfied person — the department is pretty much in the Stone Age as far as IT is concerned,” Cartwright said.

Cartwright cited problems with proprietary systems that aren’t connected to anything else and are unable to quickly adapt to changing needs. “We have huge numbers of data links that move data between proprietary platforms — one point to another point,” he said.

The most striking example of an IT failure came during the second Gulf War, where the Marines and the Army were dispatched in southern Iraq.

“Thank God there was a river going north/south that could keep them separate because their radios wouldn’t talk to each other,” Cartwright said.

“It’s crazy, we buy proprietary [and] we don’t understand what it is we’re buying into,” he said. “It works great for an application, but then you come to conflict and you spend the rest of your time trying to modify it to actually do what it should do.”

Cartwright is far from alone in faulting the government’s process for buying and deploying IT.

Last week, outgoing federal CIO Vivek Kundra said the same IT contractors keep getting government business not because they are necessarily providing the best technology, but because they understand the procurement system. He described it as almost an “IT cartel” within federal IT.