The memo, signed by Chief Information Officer Jane Rathbun and acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition Brett Seidle, established a new DON-wide policy for “containerization technology usage.”

Containerization is a software deployment process that “bundles an application’s code with all the files and libraries it needs to run on any infrastructure,” according to an AWS description of the concept.

Navy officials see major benefits in adopting that capability for the department.

“Software containerization offers transformative advantages for the DON’s IT infrastructure and software deployment capabilities. This technology enables the Department to deploy applications consistently across highly varied environments while enhancing security, reducing computing resource overhead, and accelerating development cycles. Prioritizing containerization technology aligns with the Department’s software modernization goals and supports mission-critical operations with greater reliability and efficiency,” the memo states.

The new directive, publicly released Wednesday, applies to all new software development efforts across the department’s commands and programs enabled by cloud services and deployment models where enterprise container platforms and DevSecOps pipelines exist or are in development. It comes as the Navy and Marine Corps are pursuing wide-ranging software and IT modernization initiatives, including cloud adoption and migration.

“In the drive to increase operational agility, resiliency, optimization of our investments, and to achieve an organically digital state; we must advance to modem, proven software development and delivery practices. Securely accessing and transporting data across boundaries at the speed of relevance requires operating in a cloud-enabled ecosystem and software must be designed to effectively maneuver within it,” Rathbun and Seidle stated. “Effective immediately, all software development activities transitioning to the cloud and/or upgrades that are hosted in a cloud as outlined above must utilize containerization technology to the greatest extent practical.”

Seidle signed the directive July 17. Rathbun had previously signed it.

Officials can request exemptions to the policy, but they must provide the designated cybersecurity technical authority with a detailed justification.

“Exceptions will be granted where the risk of not leveraging containerization technology is deemed acceptable or the implementation would be prohibitively expensive. Potential exceptions may include production representative digital twins (where production cannot be or is not containerized), alternative cloud scaling capabilities like serverless technologies, or virtualization technologies for hardware in the loop. An itemized bulk exception can be granted,” per the memo.

The policy will be reviewed and updated annually, according to the directive.

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The secretary’s order, signed Friday but first made public Tuesday, came after an eye-opening investigation by ProPublica revealed Microsoft had been relying on China-based engineers to support DOD cloud computing systems.

Short on specific details, Hegseth’s order enlists the CIO — with the support of the department’s heads of acquisition and sustainment, intelligence and security, and research and engineering — to “take immediate actions to ensure to the maximum extent possible that all information technology capabilities, including cloud services, developed and procured for DoD are reviewed and validated as secure against supply chain attacks by adversaries such as China and Russia.”

Hegseth first referenced his order in a video posted to X on Friday, in which he said, “some tech companies have been using cheap Chinese labor to assist with DoD cloud services,” calling for a “two-week review” to make sure that isn’t happening anywhere else in the department’s tech supply chains.

The secretary, in both his video and the new memo, stopped short of calling out Microsoft specifically. However, a spokesperson for the company has since stated publicly that it has made changes to “assure that no China-based engineering teams are providing technical assistance for DoD Government cloud and related services.”

“This is obviously unacceptable, especially in today’s digital threat environment,” Hegseth said in the Friday video, claiming that the system at the center of the incident is “a legacy system created over a decade ago during the Obama administration.”

He added: “We have to ensure the digital systems that we use here at the Defense Department are ironclad and impenetrable, and that’s why today I’m announcing that China will no longer have any involvement whatsoever in our cloud services.”

The memo itself calls on the department to “fortify existing programs and processes utilized within the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) to ensure that adversarial foreign influence is appropriately eliminated or mitigated and determine what, if any, additional actions may be required to address these risks.” Specifically, it cites the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) — the final rule for which, as of Wednesday, is undergoing regulatory review with the Office of Management and Budget — acting CIO Katie Arrington’s new Software Fast Track program, and the FedRAMP process as existing efforts the Pentagon CIO should rely on to ensure the department’s tech is secure.

Within 15 days of the order’s signing, DOD’s Office of the CIO must issue additional implementing guidance on the matter, led by department CISO Dave McKeown.

On top of that, it taps the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security to “review and validate personnel security practices and insider threat programs of the DIB and cloud service providers to the maximum extent possible.”

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The move comes as the Pentagon is pumping billions of dollars into cloud and AI programs with plans to spend more in the coming years to boost its digital modernization and give new tools to warfighters and back-office workers.

The Protecting AI and Cloud Competition in Defense Act of 2025 was reintroduced in the Senate by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., and introduced in the House by Reps. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., Pat Fallon, R-Texas, and Chris Deluzio, D-Pa., according to a press release issued Thursday by Warren’s office.

Warren and Schmitt are members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Jacobs, Fallon and Deluzio are members of the House Armed Services Committee.

The bill “would ensure that DoD’s new contracts protect competition in the AI and cloud computing markets, instead of giving an unfair advantage to a few big players,” per the release.

If enacted, the Pentagon would be required to have a competitive award process for each procurement of cloud computing, data infrastructure and foundation model solutions when contracting with vendors that have entered into contracts totaling $50 million or more with the department in any of the five previous fiscal years.

Additionally, it directs department leaders to pursue modular open systems approaches, mitigate barriers to entry faced by small businesses and nontraditional contractors, and prioritize multi-cloud technology “unless doing so is infeasible or presents a substantial danger to national security.”

The Pentagon would also have to keep lawmakers updated.

“Not later than January 15, 25 2027, and annually thereafter for four years, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in coordination with the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, shall submit to the congressional defense committees a report assessing the competition, innovation, barriers to entry, and concentrations of market power or market share in the AI space for each period covered by the report … The report shall also include recommendations of appropriate legislative and administrative action,” the bill states.

Lawmakers also aim to protect data.

The legislation calls for the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) to update or promulgate provisions of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement to ensure that government-furnished data “provided for purposes of development and operation of AI products and services to the Department of Defense, is not disclosed or used without proper authorization” — and that such data “cannot be used to train or improve the functionality of commercial products offered by a covered provider without express authorization by the Department of Defense.”

Government-furnished data stored on vendor systems “for purposes of development and operation of AI products and services” must also be “appropriately protected from other data on such systems.”

Violation of these provisions would be subject to penalties, including fines and contract termination.

However, the legislation allows for DOD component acquisition executives to issue exemptions if they determine that doing so is “necessary for national security.” The acquisition execs would be required to notify the CDAO about each exemption and provide a justification for the move.

“It’s a mistake to let Silicon Valley monopolize our AI and cloud computing tools because it doesn’t just stifle innovation, it increases costs and threatens our national security,” Warren said in a statement. “Our bill will make sure the military can access cutting-edge tools and will keep our markets strong and our information secure.”

In the press release from Warren’s office, Schmitt warned against “allowing a select group of companies to dominate the awards process,” adding that the Defense Department should adopt policies that create opportunities for emerging AI defense companies.

Jacobs said in a statement that competition “always pushes the limits of creativity, innovation, and excellence – whether in AI or any other field. That’s why the Department of Defense needs to prioritize competition in its AI and cloud computing contracts to ensure we deploy the best technologies to protect and strengthen our national security.”

Deluzio added that enacting the legislation would help “protect data and public money from the failures of concentrated power” and “promote real competition” in the defense tech sector.

“By relying on free market principles, the Department of Defense can help ensure competition and innovation when it comes to the bidding process for government AI and cloud contracts,” Fallon stated in the release. “Due to the varied cyber threats facing our nation today, we must also ensure that AI and cloud related data is secure when it is held exclusively by the federal government. For these reasons, the Protecting AI and Cloud Competition in Defense Act is the next step forward Congress must take in the interest of US national security.”

Warren and Schmitt introduced similar legislation in December during the previous session of Congress, but it was never enacted.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is looking to bring more companies into the fold for AI, cloud and other digital capabilities.

“Competition in the marketplace enables the government to acquire the best solutions at lower cost to the taxpayer. As agencies seek to accelerate the adoption of AI-enabled services, they must pay careful attention to vendor sourcing, data portability, and long-term interoperability to avoid significant and costly dependencies on a single vendor,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought wrote to department and agency heads in an April memo.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memo in March directing all Defense Department components to embrace a rapid software acquisition pathway and use commercial solutions openings and other transaction authority to speed up the procurement of digital tools for warfighters.

“When we take that software pathway mechanism and we combine it with innovation that [the Defense Innovation Unit] has been working in commercial solutions openings, or CSOs, and other transaction authorities, OTAs, we get to the point where now we can expose the programs, the software programs, to nontraditional and commercial software developers, while we simultaneously … lower the barrier for those nontraditional and commercial software developers to get into defense programs of record,” a senior defense official told reporters during a background briefing in March regarding Hegseth’s directive.

The Office of the DOD Chief Information Officer recently released an updated software modernization implementation plan. The first goal outlined in the document is to accelerate and scale the Pentagon’s enterprise cloud environment.

At AFCEA’s TechNet Cyber conference last week, Rob Vietmeyer, chief software officer for the deputy CIO for information enterprise, said the contract vehicle for the $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program — under which Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have been competing for task orders — was “suboptimal” for large acquisitions. Officials in the CIO’s office are currently planning for JWCC 2.0, a follow-on phase that aims to add more vendors and different contracting mechanisms to the program.

The DOD has a variety of cloud efforts beyond JWCC. The software modernization implementation plan also calls for the establishment of additional contract options for cloud innovation geared towards smaller vendors and “niche providers.“

“In the implementation plan, we’re trying to build that next-generation cloud infrastructure and extend it. Not just looking at JWCC, but we’re also looking at how we extend for small business cloud providers,” Vietmeyer said.

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The CIO’s recently released software modernization implementation plan for fiscal 2025 and 2026 marks another call from Pentagon leadership for the entire department to improve delivery of software-based capabilities. The document lists three key goals for the next two years — focusing on software factories, enterprise cloud and transforming processes — as well as specific tasks for each goal that aims to improve overall software modernization.

The goals and tasks in the document build upon the DOD CIO’s first software modernization implementation plan for fiscal 2023 and 2024. According to the new roadmap, the Pentagon completed 27 out of 41 of the tasks outlined in the previous plan, carried 12 tasks over to FY25 and FY26 and combined two tasks with others in the updated document.

Rob Vietmeyer, chief software officer for the deputy CIO for information enterprise, said that while working through the goals in the first implementation plan, the office realized that some of the associated tasks weren’t mature enough to fully execute on.

“For a small portion, we learned that we didn’t know enough about a couple of those activities, so we dropped them. And then some of them, we were maybe over aggressive or they evolved,” he said Wednesday during a panel discussion at AFCEA’s TechNet Cyber conference. “I’ll say, from an agile perspective, we didn’t have the user score exactly right, so some of these stories have continued into the implementation plan two.”

The first goal outlined in the new plan is to accelerate and scale the Pentagon’s enterprise cloud environment. Along with its multi-cloud, multi-vendor contract known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), the department also has a number of other efforts aimed at providing cloud infrastructure overseas and at the tactical edge. 

Vietmeyer said that even though JWCC has been a relative success — noting that the department has awarded at least $2.7 billion worth of task orders under the program — the contract vehicle was “suboptimal” for large acquisitions. The CIO is currently planning for what it calls JWCC 2.0, a follow-on phase that adds more vendors and different contracting mechanisms to the program.

Beyond JWCC, the implementation plan calls for the establishment of additional contract options for cloud innovation — specifically geared towards small business and “niche providers” — that can be awarded before the end of fiscal 2026.

“In the implementation plan, we’re trying to build that next-generation cloud infrastructure and extend it. Not just looking at JWCC, but we’re also looking at how we extend for small business cloud providers,” Vietmeyer said. 

The document also offers guidance for Pentagon efforts to expand cloud access to the edge, such as through Stratus or the Joint Operational Edge (JOE) environments. In the next two years, the department will develop a reference design for an “underlying cloud mesh” that facilitates data transport, software development and information-sharing across different infrastructures overseas, according to the plan.

The mesh architecture would allow warfighters from one military service to access a cloud node operated by a different service, or one owned by the Defense Information Systems Agency, Vietmeyer explained.

“We’ve seen that one of the challenges is moving to a mesh type of architecture, so we can identify where computing infrastructure exists and allow the warfighters to take advantage [of it],” he said. “How do we start to build the ability for applications and data to scale across that infrastructure in a highly resilient way?”

Along with enterprise cloud, another goal within the updated implementation plan focuses on creating a Pentagon-wide software factory ecosystem that fully leverages a DevSecOps approach. The CIO intends to take successful practices from the various software factories in DOD and replicate them across the department, according to the plan.

“DoD must continue to scale success and bridge the right disciplines together … to ensure end-to-end enablement and realization of the software modernization vision and adoption of software platforms and factories organized by domain,” the document stated.

The CIO will also work to remove existing processes and red tape that prevents software developers from accessing critical tools and capabilities; increase the number of platforms with continuous authorization to operate (cATO) approvals; and create a DevSecOps reference design for artificial intelligence and software-based automation deployment.

Lastly, the implementation plan outlines multiple tasks geared towards evolving the Pentagon’s policies, regulations and standards to better support software development and delivery — including creating secure software standards, improving software deployment in weapons platforms and growing its workforce.

Although work to accelerate the Pentagon’s software modernization has been happening for years, leaders at the department have begun pushing for more focused efforts to remove bureaucratic red tape through new guidance — such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Modern Software Acquisition memo released in March, and the CIO’s new Software Fast Track (SWIFT) program.

“For modern practices to become the routine way of developing and delivering software, policy, regulations, and standards must be reviewed and updated,” the implementation plan stated. “DoD must work with DoD Components to update policy and guidance to reduce the barriers to adopting new practices and to accelerate software delivery and cybersecurity approvals to enable adoption of the latest tools and services.”

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The aim is to “cut wasteful spending” and “support the continued rationalization” of the Defense Department’s IT enterprise, Hegseth wrote.

The move comes amid a broader push by the Trump administration to implement Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives across federal agencies.

Hegseth’s new memo to senior Pentagon leadership ordered the termination of contracts affecting a variety of DOD components, including a Defense Health Agency contract for consulting services; an Air Force contract to re-sell third party enterprise cloud IT services; a Navy contract for business process consulting services; and a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract for IT helpdesk services.

In a video released on social media touting these DOGE-related efforts, Hegseth estimated that those contract terminations would save the Pentagon approximately $1.8 billion, $1.4 billion, $500 million and $500 million, respectively.

“These contracts represent non-essential spending on third party consultants to perform services more efficiently performed by the highly skilled members of our DoD workforce using existing resources,” he wrote in the memo.

Hegseth also tasked the Pentagon CIO to work with the DOGE team to produce a plan within 30 days for how DOD will in-source IT consulting and management services to the department’s civilian workforce.

The new call for in-sourcing comes as Pentagon leaders are advancing efforts to make major cuts to the civilian workforce. Hegseth has said he wants to reinvest savings from employee reductions into higher-priority warfighting capabilities.

The plan from the CIO that Hegseth ordered in Thursday’s memo must also address how the Defense Department will negotiate “most favorable rates on software and cloud services, so the DoD pays no more for IT services than any other enterprise in America,” the SecDef wrote.

The memo also tasks the chief information officer to complete an audit of Pentagon software licensing by April 18. The purpose of the audit is “to ensure we are only paying for the licenses we actually use, the features we actually need, at the most favorable rates,” according to Hegseth.

Katie Arrington is currently performing the duties of DOD CIO.

Earlier this week at the Sea-Air-Space conference, Navy Chief Information Officer Jane Rathbun said DOGE and the DOD CIO were reviewing the service’s software enterprise.

“It’s all about making the right investments in modernizing, but modernizing with an eye towards effectiveness and efficiency. We’ve got this new administration. We’ve got the DOGE in working with us, and they’re focused on effective consumption of commercial software. Are we doing the best job we can deliver in buying and utilizing the software that we have?” she said.

The Navy is a huge purchaser of software licenses, Rathbun noted.

“It’s a big number. And so are we buying effectively? Are we utilizing the things that we’re buying effectively? There’s always opportunity for improvement. And I would say that’s an area in my portfolio that I want to focus on but have not a lot of people to do that, which is something that has always bothered me and I want to be doing better at is really this optimization concept. I’ve got to continuously modernize but I have to do it in an optimal way,” she said.

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Although the Army’s main fighting formation was brigades for the last 20 years of the global war on terror, it’s now shifting to division as the unit of action, and corps will also be a critical echelon that must relearn old lessons regarding how to mobilize in a new era where counterterrorism and counterinsurgency are no longer the service’s main focus.

Corps is an important echelon as many authorities are held at this level and it acts as the bridge between tactical Army forces and joint task forces across an assigned theater with other services.

As officials seeks to determine how to deploy, corps leaders understand that much like subordinate units, they must have mobile and survivable command posts. As part of that, they must figure out what’s needed for the right mix of cloud-based access and edge computing.

“How do we build resilient, survivable, adaptable command posts? Some of that involves things like, do we build out an edge capability? We have our first edge nodes that we’re playing with out at [Project Convergence] Capstone,” Col. Edwin Mathias, the corps’ chief of staff, said in an interview.  

The Army as a whole is looking at the mix of edge and cloud. Forces are beginning to understand that the complex operating environment of the future will present communications and network challenges by adversaries, what the military calls DDIL or “denied, degraded, intermittent and limited.”

Access to the cloud could be limited or disrupted, necessitating a local edge capability until those connections can be reestablished.

At XVIII Airborne Corps’ warfighter exercise last August, a large command post exercise, one of the biggest lessons was the need for an edge capability when cloud access was lost.

“Everything that we do now is cloud-based at the corps level. When we lost communications for the network — and that was basically because we had so much data going out that the network was not in a position to handle it — we didn’t have any connectivity to the systems that we needed to have connection to, which drove our focus to really get after the edge capability,” Col. Nicole Vinson, the corps’ chief communications officer, said in an interview. “The edge capability, technically, we’re looking at, is how do you do it? But then once we get something at the edge, which we have now at PC, you can start driving the conversation of what information do you need to have access to at the edge, what applications do you need to continue to operate at the edge? We can change the conversation from the technology knowing that we need it, but now starting to figure out what capabilities and what mission sets do you need to be able to continue to operate when in any kind of disconnected environment?”

The XVIII Airborne Corps is looking to test two different edge node versions, with one being a cloud-to-edge capability that will be tested for the first time. The corps created a tactical cloud to take capabilities from the cloud and deploy what they need at the edge, which will allow them to change depending on the mission set.

The goal is to try to get away from the stovepiped edge capabilities of the past and move to a more dynamic and flexible environment.

“We’ve always fought against different stovepipes. What we’re really trying to get after with our command post is to be lighter, faster, more mobile. The more we deliver these stovepiped edge capabilities, we’re not really accomplishing what we set out to achieve,” Vinson said. “The way we want to be able to operate is to be able to come together as a command post but then push the different groups out.”

The corps wants to look at four different groups to operate independent of each other and then determine what edge capability needs to be with each group.

This goes back to the need for survivable, adaptable and resilient command posts, based on observations from Ukraine and the recognition that larger and static command posts are juicy targets.

“Our ability to disaggregate the staffs into multiple nodes and reduce our signature is important,” Mathias said. “Those edge nodes, those independent transport capabilities would allow us to operate our current operations for one location, our fusion cell with our intel and fires team in another location, our administrative logistics component in another location, and then our network and G-6 team in yet another.”

Moreover, Project Convergence is allowing the corps to determine what mission sets need to come up to that level, now that the Army is shifting to division as the unit of action instead of brigade.

As division has become the main fighting unit, the Army has sought to move much of the network complexity out of brigades to the division level to enable those smaller units to focus on their fights as opposed to grappling with the network.

“One of the key elements that we have to be very cautious of is with the brigades and the division going to [secure but unclassified-encrypted] is how do we as a corps continue to be able to tie into those organizations without having so much burden on the division? There’s a lot of work going on at Project Convergence with the cross-domain solutions until we can get to a true zero-trust capability,” Vinson said.

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IVAS has been one of the service’s highest-priority modernization initiatives, with Microsoft as the prime contractor. The system — which includes ruggedized headgear and software with night-vision, thermal-sensing and augmented reality capabilities, among others — was inspired by the company’s HoloLens 2 device. The Army aims to use the equipment for training and battlefield operations for dismounted troops. The program was projected to be worth as much as $21.9 billion if it reaches full fruition.

“Through this partnership agreement, and pending Department of Defense approval, Anduril will assume oversight of production, future development of hardware and software, and delivery timelines. This agreement also establishes Microsoft Azure as Anduril’s preferred hyperscale cloud for all workloads related to IVAS and Anduril AI technologies,” the companies said in a joint press release. “Anduril’s mission focus on innovation in defense technology, deep understanding of military requirements, and unique approach to manufacturing defense products will ensure future program development specifically tailored to the evolving needs of the Army as well as production at scale and at lower unit cost.”

The firms have already been teaming on IVAS. In September 2024, Anduril announced that its Lattice platform was being incorporated into the system. Lattice can be employed as a situational awareness tool that uses capabilities such as AI, computer vision, edge computing and sensor fusion to detect, track and classify objects of interest for users, according to a product description.

The Army has been rolling out different variants of IVAS to soldiers for experimentation and to get their feedback on the technology. The latest iteration developed by Microsoft is known as IVAS 1.2. Microsoft had already been making enhancements to IVAS equipment and software, some of which were prompted by soldier complaints about early versions.

The Army requested $255 million from Congress for fiscal 2025 to buy more IVAS systems — including 3,162 IVAS 1.2 heads-up-display platforms — as well as $98 million for research, development, test and evaluation related to the technology.

Anduril founder Palmer Luckey previously launched Oculus VR, the startup known for its commercial virtual reality headset which went on to be acquired by Facebook.

“For me, this announcement is deeply personal. Since my pre-Oculus days as a teenager who had the opportunity to do a tiny bit of work on the Army’s BRAVEMIND project, I’ve believed there would be a headset on every soldier long before there is a headset on every civilian. Given that America loses more troops in training than combat, the Squad Immersive Virtual Trainer (SiVT) side of IVAS alone has the potential to save more lives than practically anything else we can imagine building,” Luckey wrote in a blog — titled “Turning Soldiers into Superheroes” — published Tuesday.

Anduril is also building a variety of drones and other high-tech tools, such as “edge data integration services capabilities,” for the Pentagon. In December, it announced that it was forming an alliance with Palantir and a new “consortium” to merge AI capabilities for defense customers.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is touting its ability to deliver cloud capabilities to boost Anduril’s products.

“Microsoft’s advanced cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities will continue to provide a robust backbone for the [IVAS] program, enabling seamless data integration and real-time insights critical to soldier effectiveness. Artificial intelligence will be foundational to all technical innovations for national security missions, and the cloud is essential to successfully delivering AI whenever and wherever it is needed. Through this agreement, Anduril will establish Azure as its preferred hyperscale cloud to support its AI development. Azure, through its commercial, U.S. government and classified clouds, provides high resiliency, sophisticated capabilities, flexibility and advanced security, designed to meet the stringent compliance requirements of the nation’s most sensitive data,” the companies said in a release.

Microsoft is already a major cloud vendor for the Pentagon. It’s one of four companies  — along with Google, Oracle and Amazon Web Services — that were chosen to compete for task orders for the $9 billion enterprise Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) program.

It’s unclear if the DOD will approve the program handover that Microsoft and Anduril are proposing for IVAS.

The new partnership agreement comes at a critical time for the IVAS program. The plan was to transition it to a major capability acquisition pathway no later than October 2025.

However, Army officials are preparing to potentially recompete the IVAS  effort via an initiative known as IVAS Next.

Last month, the service released a request for information for IVAS Next, seeking information from vendors to determine their capabilities to act as a prime contractor in the development and manufacturing of the technology.

“This RFI does not constitute a Request for Proposal (RFP) or a promise to issue an RFP in the future,” officials noted.

Companies were asked to include information about the design and features of their IVAS Next solution.

“The narrative should cover Heads Up Display (HUD), body-worn compute, night vision capability, company-level communications network, and any software supporting services or systems (e.g., Cloud or Edge computing),” officials wrote.

Vendors were also asked to lay out a program management approach for their IVAS Next solution, including identifying teaming arrangements and key subcontractors and suppliers.

The Microsoft and Anduril announcement was released on the same day that the Army had scheduled a virtual industry day for IVAS Next.

“The purpose of this event is to inform interested companies of the IVAS Next requirements and acquisition path and to hold an open forum for discussion of IVAS Next capability requirements,” officials wrote in a special notice.

Last year, DefenseScoop asked Anduril officials if the company was considering competing as a prime contractor for IVAS Next.

“We’re closely following the developments around IVAS-next and are confident that the combined strengths of Anduril and Microsoft can deliver a solution that enhances both soldier survivability and lethality. We will continue to monitor IVAS-next, and as always, we are committed to positioning ourselves to do what’s best for the warfighter, staying true to our mission of delivering the most effective solutions,” an Anduril spokesperson said.

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One such capability is edge computing and cloud. Once a prominent fixture for buzzword bingo, where government and industry types opined on deploying, the service is beginning to take a slightly different view on who will need these technologies and how feasible it will be to deliver them given the speed of war in the future.

“Somebody asked me the other day about ‘we need to scale this cloud thing all the way at the tactical edge.’ I was like, ‘to do what?’ … That’s not how the Army fights,” Leonel Garciga, Army chief information officer, said Friday at AFCEA’s Northern Virginia Chapter Army IT Day. “If we’re learning anything in Ukraine is these micro things that are happening, you’re not going to be doing that in the cloud, you’re not going to be scaling all these services. I think we really need to start focusing on building that [concept of operation] of how we’ve got to fight, so it can drive the right capabilities at echelon.”

Garciga added that the Defense Department needs to understand how it’s going to fight in the future and build capabilities that are needed at echelon and at the tactical edge. That also means determining what the edge is, which will vary across theaters, units, services and agencies.

“Broader, across the department, the Navy is going to look a little different, that’s a thing. Air Force is going to look a little different. Combat support agencies [are] going to look a little different. I think at echelon, what we call ‘edge’ matters,” he said.

Using the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as an example of a combat support agency, Garciga noted that NGA’s edge is a region.

The Army has been trying to simplify its network and remove complexity from smaller units so they can be unburdened to focus on fighting rather than running the network.

Saddling them with more edge capabilities could run counter to that initiative.

“We need to be very, very, very careful in this space to not do the opposite of what we’re trying to do as an Army, which is reduce complexity at the tactical” level, Garciga said. “It’s like somebody came here, they said, ‘oh we got to do this at BCT, or we got to push this data all the way down to the platoon.’ I’m like, ‘isn’t that the opposite of where we’re going as an Army?’ We have made a conscious decision to reduce complexity, why are we bringing complexity back down?”

Other officials explained how the Army is working to define what the edge is, who needs what capabilities, and what their roles are.

“I think it depends on your role. Like maybe future ops, current ops in the brigade or in a company, if that’s their role, maybe they need edge compute. We’ve got to stop thinking of the Army as everybody has. It’s what is your role — and then you get that on-demand capability. I think that’s what we’ve got to experiment with,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for command, control, communications and network, told DefenseScoop on the sidelines of the event. “If you’re a battalion commander and you have a company of small form factor [unmanned aerial systems] that’s collecting data, they may need edge compute in order to collect and process that data — whereas the other companies may be running patrol or perimeter security, they may not necessarily need edge compute. Thinking about roles in a tactical formation may help us get to some of these decisions about edge compute and what the edge compute means operationally.”

Kitz said the Army will be experimenting with what edge compute could look like at the Project Convergence Capstone 5 event later this year. Questions officials will be seeking to answer include: what data would soldiers have access to and how is it secured it?

Those questions and answers will factor into the ongoing development of one of the service’s top initiatives, Next Generation Command and Control, a completely new approach to how the Army plans to operate on the battlefield that aims to provide commanders and units with a better path to information, data and command and control through agile and software-based architectures.

According to Kitz, as that effort rolls out, the next questions will be: what can the Army put at the platoon level or the company level and beyond, to determine at what echelons would small form factor compute look like and what transport can be taken advantage of?

Officials conducting NGC2 experimentation efforts have stated that they are defining the platoon level as the tactical edge.

“We can’t go back to the cloud for everything that we’re going to do. It won’t be available. We started thinking through all right, what are we going to need to be able to process at the tactical edge, once again, defining the platoon as that tactical edge?” Col. Mike Kaloostian, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at Army Futures Command, said at the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting last month. “What can we do? What new edge compute capabilities, what low [size, weight and power], high-capacity edge compute capabilities exist so we can experiment and just learn from right now, and we can deploy those micro services to the edge? We can host and process certain data flows and data sets at the edge and see, and just ensure that we are not always going back to the cloud for everything and further driving down the latency.”

As part of the experimentation efforts, Kitz reiterated that the Army will embark upon exploring what the edge looks like, because “I don’t know that we know the answer to that.”

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Deasy served as the Pentagon CIO during the first Trump administration starting in May 2018 and oversaw a variety of high-profile modernization initiatives.

He was at the helm when the department moved to large-scale telework as employees adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic. He established the COVID-19 Telework Readiness Task Force — which included officials from U.S. Cyber Command, Joint Force Headquarters-Department of Defense Information Network (JFHQ-DODIN), the National Security Agency, Defense Information Systems Agency, Joint Staff, the military services and the CIO’s office — to boost network capacity and deal with what he called an “unprecedented demand for new equipment ranging from tablets, laptops and network equipment to secure devices.”

Those efforts included rolling out tools such as the Commercial Virtual Remote Environment.

During his tenure, the Pentagon stood up the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) to help accelerate the adoption of AI by the Defense Department. The JAIC was later folded — along with several other organizations — into a new Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) during the Biden administration.

The department also adopted a set of AI ethical principles in 2020 while Deasy was CIO, which stated that the U.S. military’s tech in this area must be “responsible, equitable, traceable, reliable and governable.”

At the time, he suggested that those principles could also be relevant to the private sector.

“Having been on both sides, there is nothing in these principles as you read them that are uniquely and only specific to the DOD. Any one of these is absolutely applicable to the private industry as well,” he told reporters during a February 2020 press briefing, according to a DOD transcript. “Am I trying to suggest that we are going to be the leaders in driving out in the corporate world? No. The corporate world will pick up at that and deal with it in the appropriate way. But I think the application of how you could apply these are very applicable to private industry.”

Deasy was an advocate for enterprise cloud efforts, but the department’s ill-fated Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) initiative fizzled during his tenure. The Pentagon later replaced it with the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) program.

When officials released a new data strategy in October 2020, Deasy likened data to “ammunition,” saying in a statement that it was “increasingly central to warfighter advantage on and off the battlefield” and needed to be “persistently available to the men and women of the DOD regardless of echelon or geographic location.”

After leaving the Defense Department in 2021, Deasy started his own advisory company, served on corporate boards and was an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, according to his LinkedIn profile.

John Sherman succeeded Deasy as Pentagon CIO and served in that position during most of the Biden administration. Last year, Sherman left the department to become dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Leslie Beavers is currently serving as acting DOD CIO.

Prior to his time at the Pentagon, Deasy worked in corporate leadership positions, including in CIO roles for JPMorgan Chase & Co., BP, General Motors, Tyco International and Siemens AG.

In his new role at Boeing, he’ll “oversee all aspects of information technology, information security, and data and analytics” and serve on the firm’s executive council, the company said in a press release.

Boeing is an aerospace giant and a contractor for a variety of major DOD programs.

Deasy will report to Kelly Ortberg, Boeing’s president and CEO.

“Dana is a well-respected, global technology leader who has a track record of delivering on innovative technologies across large and complex organizations,” Ortberg said in a statement. “With the need to stay vigilant to protect against cyber threats, and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence playing a larger role across all industries, our IT team will have a key role as we focus on meeting our safety and quality goals, delivering reliably for our customers and positioning ourselves for the future.”

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The Protecting AI and Cloud Competition in Defense Act, introduced by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., strives for “meaningful regulation to limit Big Tech monopolies from elbowing out competitors in the AI and cloud computing markets,” according to a press release issued Thursday by Warren’s office.

“Right now, all of our eggs are in one giant Silicon Valley basket. That doesn’t only stifle innovation, but it’s more expensive and it seriously increases our security risks,” Warren said in a statement. “Our new bill will make sure that as the Department of Defense keeps expanding its use of AI and cloud computing tools, it’s making good deals that will keep our information secure and our government resilient.”

Schmitt in a statement said the bipartisan legislation “will encourage resiliency, interoperability, and innovation.”

Both Warren and Schmitt are members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The new bill would require a competitive award process for each procurement of cloud computing, data infrastructure and foundation model solutions — and have Uncle Sam maintain exclusive rights to access and use of all government data — when contracting with vendors that have entered into contracts totaling $50 million or more with the Pentagon in any of the five previous fiscal years.

Contracting provisions would have to prioritize “the appropriate role” for the government with respect to intellectual property and data rights and security, interoperability and auditability requirements; include modular open systems approaches and “appropriate work allocation” and technical boundaries; and consider multi-cloud technology “where feasible and advantageous,” according to the text of the legislation.

In a section about data training and use protection, the bill calls for the secretary of defense to direct the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) to update or promulgate provisions of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement to ensure that government-furnished data “provided for purposes of development and operation of AI products and services to the Department of Defense, is not disclosed or used without proper authorization” by the Pentagon — and that government-furnished data stored on vendor systems “provided for purposes of development and operation of AI products and services” is “appropriately protected from other data on such systems, and is treated in accordance with Department of Defense data decrees and Creating Data Advantage (Open DAGIR) principles.”

Violation of these provisions would be subject to penalties, including fines and contract termination.

However, the legislation would allow for DOD component acquisition executives to issue exemptions if they determine that doing so isn’t “inconsistent with national security.” The acquisition execs would be required to notify the CDAO of the specific provisions exempted, the vendor and program being exempted, and the justification for the move.

The bill also contains reporting requirements.

“Not later than January 15, 2026, and annually thereafter for four years, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in coordination with the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, shall submit to the congressional defense committees a report assessing the competition, innovation, barriers to entry, and concentrations of market power or market share in the AI space for each period covered by the report. The report shall also include recommendations of appropriate legislative and administrative action,” the legislation states.

The department would be required to post a publicly releasable version of the reports on a DOD website for transparency purposes.

The introduction of the bill comes as the Pentagon is pumping billions of dollars into cloud and AI projects to acquire cutting-edge capabilities for warfighters and new tools to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of back-office functions.

The press release from Warren’s office noted that the department has already awarded a $9 billion cloud program to Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon.

That initiative, known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), has the tech giants competing for task orders. The Pentagon pivoted away from contracting a single vendor for a previous enterprise cloud capability known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), and instead sought a multi-vendor acquisition approach. When the JWCC program was awarded in December 2022, Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon were seen as the only vendors that could meet the Pentagon’s security requirements for that effort.

However, more recently the Defense Information Systems Agency has been looking to include more cloud service providers and possibly introduce new contracting mechanisms for the next iteration of the program, dubbed JWCC 2.0.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has been awarding large contracts to AI vendors such as Palantir, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley, and Anduril.

Major DOD programs are generally open to industry competition under federal acquisition rules.

The press release from Warren’s office stated that the new bill will “ensure that DoD’s new contracts protect competition in the AI and cloud computing markets, instead of giving an unfair advantage to a few big players.”

It’s currently unclear if the legislation will have enough political support to be enacted. It would have to pass both the Senate and the House and be signed into law by the president before the end of the current term of Congress. Next month, a new Congress and administration will enter office.

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