WASHINGTON — The Army’s troubled $5 billion intelligence fusion network has been a source of lucrative contracts to companies whose employees once worked for the Army, while failing to deliver on its promise of making data seamlessly accessible to soldiers in the field, according to records and interviews.

The Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS-A) was supposed to integrate intelligence from a network of sensors and databases to provide a common intelligence picture from the Pentagon to the farthest reaches of Afghanistan.

But the program so far has been a bust, with one memorable Army testing report finding it “not operationally effective, not operationally suitable and not survivable.”

The performance failures of the network have been well-documented, but less scrutiny has been devoted to the revolving door between defense companies that profit from the troubled intelligence system and the military commands that continue to fund it, records show.

Several people who worked in key roles in Army intelligence left for top jobs at those companies. In the world of government contracting, that’s not illegal or entirely uncommon, but critics say it perpetuates a culture of failure.