A major Department of Defense commercial cloud deal has contracted considerably after officials experienced buyer's remorse―or maybe after Oracle protests used a Jedi mind trick.

Last year, as part of a program spurred by the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), the US Transportation Command inked a deal with Amazon Web Services reseller REAN Cloud to start moving five of its logistics applications into the commercial cloud. Since USTRANSCOM relies a great deal on commercial logistics and transportation providers to get things places, this was a relatively easy sell to Department of Defense top brass.

The migration went so smoothly (by DOD standards) that the "Sprint to the Cloud" team at USTRANSCOM won the program an honorable mention in the DOD CIO's Cyber and Information Technology Excellence awards. And it came at a time when DOD leadership—and Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick M. Shanahan (a former Boeing executive) in particular—has been pushing for the DOD to offload more stuff to the commercial cloud.

But perhaps some people at the DOD got a little too excited about the commercial cloud, because in February, the department inked a five-year, $950 million contract with REAN Cloud to take the idea to the next level—a contract that Defense Department spokesman Col. Robert Manning announced yesterday would be "narrowly tailored to the original scope" under the original effort at USTRANSCOM rather than going DOD-wide. The narrowing reduces the size of the value of the deal to REAN to $65 million over its lifetime.

The change in REAN's fortunes came after protests to the Government Accountability Office over the deal―particularly from Oracle, which hopes to cash in on the DOD's newly acquired commercial cloud religion. Oracle's representatives complained that REAN "serves as a front for Amazon Web Services" and that the terms of the deal were "shrouded in secrecy."

The protest has not yet been adjudicated by GAO. But the DOD is also in the midst of planning a much larger cloud push, called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud (JEDI Cloud). And the announcement of the review and reduction of the REAN Cloud deal came just two days before the DOD's planned kickoff of JEDI with an industry day on March 7.