The Pentagon on Wednesday announced a ‌five-year, $9.69 billion agreement to consolidate ‌Microsoft and other enterprise software licenses scattered across ​the military services, the intelligence community, and the U.S. Coast Guard into a single contract vehicle, officials said. The cost-cutting ‌effort hands Microsoft ⁠a guaranteed enterprise-wide foothold across the U.S. armed forces while ⁠squeezing out duplicative spending that officials said had quietly ballooned across years ​of fragmented, ​go-it-alone procurement. The deal, ​called the Core ‌Enterprise Technology Agreement, is not new spending because baskets of Pentagon software contracts came up for renewal simultaneously.