"Disapproval of the Palantir platform will be detrimental to counter-IED analysis and operations," he said in the memo.

Army spokesman Lt. Col. Freddie Mack told Security Clearance the 4th BCT had been approved to receive Palantir, after an initial denial, but Mack said he was unaware of whether it was a final, top-level signoff on deploying the system.

At the time of this publishing, the Army had not responded to further questions about the approval or when the 4th BCT would be receiving Palantir.

The unit is on a nine-month deployment, which means some troops could be returning back to the United States by February 2013 or earlier.

A similar Palantir request by a unit in the 2nd Infantry Division in 2009 also was denied initially prior to deployment, but the Army eventually approved the request after multiple requests from the unit while it was in the field.

However, bureaucratic delays slowed delivery, and the system was received in Afghanistan just two months before the unit was to return home, according to a staffer familiar with the issue in Hunter's office.

The delay did not allow for training on the system or enough time to plug in information to make its matrix useful to identify potential IED sites, according to the staffer in Hunter's office.

According to CNN records, at least four soldiers from the 4th BCT have been killed since arriving in Afghanistan in June, two by IEDs.

Security Clearance has reported extensively on the bureaucratic flap between Army civilians and soldiers in the field requesting the software over the DCGS. In an August report about a memo from the head of the Army's test and evaluation command, Gen. Genaro J. Dellarocco, to Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Raymond Odierno hammered the DCGS for its "poor reliability" and "significant limitations" during operational testing and evaluation earlier this year.

Security Clearance also reported that earlier this year, after ordering the Palantir system pushed out to units in Afghanistan that had been urgently asking for it, Odierno requested that the Army's operational test command report on the software system by surveying troops who have used it.

Documents obtained by Security Clearance show that the initial report came back with overwhelmingly positive feedback on Palantir and recommended that more computer servers be put into Afghanistan so more units could use the system.

But despite the findings, the commander of the test command, Col. Joseph M. Martin, reportedly ordered the report destroyed and another report generated that removed favorable references to Palantir. An Army investigation is still ongoing into that incident.

The Army has spent over $2.3 billion in procurement and research and development to fund the DCGS. The Palantir system requested by U.S. troops is about $2 million, according to congressional staff familiar with the programs.