Brian Hermann, director and program executive officer for DISA’s PEO Cyber, told a small group of reporters Friday that the agency expects to complete all ICAM federation activities with the services by the end of fiscal 2025.

The plan is to build off ongoing work with the Army and federate its ICAM solutions in March. DISA will then work with the Navy and Marine Corps to federate their instances by the end of June, and finally complete federation with the Air and Space Forces before the end of September, Hermann said.

ICAM generally comprises a set of IT policies, systems and security tools that verifies users have the right credentials to access certain parts of a network — in this case the Pentagon’s. While various Defense Department components have worked to develop their own ICAM capabilities, the larger department has sought to create and implement an enterprise solution to streamline information sharing across the Department of Defense Information Network, as well as with international allies and partners. 

“ICAM is how we work across the department, as well as how we work with our mission partners,” Hermann said. “Enabling our work with allied and coalition partners means we have to have some connectivity and understanding of who we’re working with in that coalition, make sure that we have an understanding of their access rights and grant them access to DOD resources — as well as grant DOD users access to things that we have to share with those mission partners.”

Overall, ICAM is a key part of the Defense Department’s journey to operating under a zero-trust cybersecurity framework, which requires all users and devices connected to a network to be continually authorized as they move through it. Hermann emphasized that DISA’s federation activity is crucial in the department’s goal of achieving “target levels” of zero trust by the end of fiscal 2027.

“We’re leading that effort for the department,” he said. “Any other ICAM implementations that may exist are going to depend on us getting this federation activity done.”

At the end of 2024, DISA stood up a federation hub to begin work consolidating the Pentagon’s existing ICAM instances, beginning with the Army’s, Hermann noted. The hub gives DISA a “total picture” of all the information users can access and ensures the agency can deconflict roles they might have in other systems across the department, he said.

Once the federation is complete with the military services, Hermann said DISA plans to connect with the Defense Manpower Data Centers — a repository of information on the Pentagon’s personnel and manpower. The agency plans to pick up ICAM federation efforts on classified networks in the future as well, he added.

While Hermann couldn’t provide an exact number of applications that will need to be federated across the Pentagon, he said it is more than first expected. He noted that federation work has also given different components insights on what systems they can modernize and others that have to be replaced in the future.

“This helps the exercise of determining whether something needs to get modernized and moved to ICAM, or it needs to potentially go away and cease to exist,” Hermann said. “I think there’s a lot of application rationalization that goes on across the department in this process, and that’s probably a good house-cleaning exercise.”

As it goes through the federation process, DISA is working with Pentagon components to determine whether an enterprise ICAM solution will meet their specific needs and avoid having too many instances across the department, Hermann said.

“We really want to prove that there’s no way that [something] could be supported by an existing ICAM before we create new ones because it’s not cheap to do this. There ought to be a real strong impetus for why we would have more of these,” he said. “I strongly believe in enterprise, and I want to try and make it work as much as possible. When we do that, then we have less requirements for federation because more users are being served by the enterprise solution.

Still, Hermann emphasized the importance of finding the right balance of ICAM solutions available, as having too few available would create bottlenecks for the Defense Department. To that end, allowing the military services to have their own ICAM solutions is helping DISA move faster with adoption, he said.

“My sincere hope is that at some point in the future, we can consolidate somewhat, but getting everybody to ICAM implementation and adoption quickly is served well by having some separate instances of ICAM,” Hermann said. “That, right now, is the longest pole in the tent of adopting ICAM — making sure that the application owners are able to work with their ICAM providers and get their applications connected.”

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The report, “Navigating the Intelligence Community IT Roadmap,” analyzes key challenges facing the IC and outlines how existing and tested technology capabilities can help IC components gain a strategic advantage over adversaries.

The report’s timely release aligns with the IC’s five-year IT roadmap, which seeks to advance intelligence operations by promoting seamless collaboration, enhanced data sharing and management and the ability to deploy the newest tech innovations rapidly.

The report highlights a variety of currently available technical capabilities developed by GDIT as part of its long-standing work to support the U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, including:

• DeepSky — a private, multi-cloud, on-prem data center environment developed and maintained by GDIT that facilitates the testing of emerging technology and security capabilities from multiple providers in collaboration with government agencies and their partners. “It’s really difficult to ingest massive amounts of data from a bunch of tools and make it usable for an engineer, an analyst or an executive. So DeepSky helps make those tools work together,” says Ryan Deslauriers, director of cybersecurity at GDIT.

• Mission Partner Environments — a new generation of interoperable networking and data exchange environments. Originally designed to allow military units to exchange data with specific partners, these expanded information-sharing environments enable the selective yet secure sharing of sensitive and classified information with trusted military and coalition partners. MPEs make it possible to take a “full report, break out what can and can’t be released, and push it to the appropriate network virtually and automatically so that information gets to relevant users where they are in a timely fashion,” explains Jennifer Krischer, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who now serves as vice president for defense intelligence at GDIT.

• Raven — a mobile command center tech suite developed by GDIT that fits in the back of a truck. It extends and deploys the data mesh concept to mobile environments. It can be utilized for disaster relief, special forces operations, or disconnected environments, enabling operators to collect and disseminate data from the tactical edge directly to users on the ground and back to the enterprise. Raven is an example of how GDIT “enables teams to conduct their mission without having to develop, build, maintain, and operate the services internally,” notes Nicholas Townsend, senior director at GDIT.

• Federated Data Fabric — creates a unified data environment through a centralized service platform designed to streamline data curation, management, and dissemination and enable seamless access to data independent of its source or security level. It allows users on the network’s edge to discover, request, publish and subscribe to information within a federated network environment.

Workforce commitment

The report also highlights GDIT’s distinctive approach to hiring and training professionals with extensive defense, IC, and technical experience who uniquely understand the needs of the government’s mission.

“Our workforce two to five years from now will need to be different from what it is today and prepared to take advantage of new technology,” notes Chaz Mason, mission engineering and delivery lead at GDIT. Recognizing this, GDIT doubled its investment in tuition and technical training programs in 2023. More than 20,000 employees have taken at least one of our cyber, AI, and cloud upskilling programs, he said.

GDIT’s staff currently numbers 30,000 professionals supporting customers in over 400 locations across 30 countries; 25%+ of the workforce are veterans.

Read more about how GDIT’s vendor-agnostic technology and decades of government customer experience can help achieve the Intelligence Community’s data-sharing vision.

This article was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and DefenseScoop and sponsored by GDIT.

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Much of the DOD’s tech is decades old, which isn’t helpful as the Pentagon pursues cloud migration and other digital transformation efforts.

“We have a lot of legacy applications within the department — I mean a lot,” John Hale, chief of cloud services at the Defense Information Systems Agency, said Thursday during a panel at a GDIT event produced by FedScoop in collaboration with AWS.

“We still have applications that run on mainframes that are critical to day-to-day operations, and the people who wrote those are dead. Right? Point blank. And so, you know, how do you modernize those? How do you facilitate those and move those applications into a more cloud-friendly environment? And we’re using AI, actually, to do that,” he said. “We’re using AI capabilities to actually modernize legacy code that all the people who ever wrote it are long gone. And, you know, it’s not perfect, but it gets us like 80-85 percent of the way there, and then we’re able to manually fill in that last 10 to 15 percent to bring these applications into the 21st century. Right? And that’s a combination of, you know, cloud capabilities, but it’s also a combination of AI and the ability to think outside the box from a leadership perspective.”

But IT modernization isn’t just a technology challenge at the DOD. There are also policy-related hurdles.

“I would say the number one barrier, and I harp on this on a regular basis, is acquisition policy within the department,” Hale said. “We still buy IT as if it was a weapon system. You have to do your planning and your budget cycles in such a way that don’t really facilitate agile capabilities, right? My joke was I just submitted my best [fiscal] ‘26 budget, right? So it’s September of 2024. I just submitted my budget for 2026. And in that budget, I had to submit my FYDP plan, my five-year plan. So not only did I submit my budget for 2026, I had to also plan what I was going to spend all the way through to 2031. In today’s world, with how rapid things are changing and how agile technology and capabilities are, … those are the handcuffs that we’re playing under.”

Rather than trying to predict years ahead of time what the Pentagon’s IT needs will be, it would be better for officials to have more flexibility to buy capabilities on demand, he suggested.

“Those are where I think the procurement laws need to be changed and updated to deal with what we’re doing today because the policies that are in place from a procurement and acquisition aspect are rooted in, you know, 1945 thought. And we’re just, we’re way beyond that,” Hale said.

He noted that he’s working closely with officials in the department’s acquisition arm to try to change problematic policies where they can.

The current way of doing business can be a headache, which causes DOD employees to try to find workarounds, he suggested.

“It is such a hindrance to getting things done within the department that you end up with shadow IT that people are hiding everything in everywhere they can, in order to get the job done. And in the end, it’s only going to make things more vulnerable,” Hale said.

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Her departure is effective May 31, according to an announcement.

As the first-ever head of PEO Digital, which was established in 2020, Youngs Lew oversaw key information technology modernization efforts across the department. The office’s vast portfolio includes platform application services, digital workplace services, infrastructure services, cybersecurity and operational services, end-user services, public safety systems, and DON special IT services.

The organization’s mission is to “realize the vision of digital transformation and to optimize program alignment across the Navy and Marine Corps enterprise IT capabilities,” according to its website.

Last year, Youngs Lew signed a memo that established the new Neptune Cloud Management Office to help centralize and streamline the acquisition and delivery of cloud capabilities across the sea services.

Before taking on her current role, she led PEO for enterprise information systems — which was disestablished to make way for PEO Digital and program executive office for manpower, logistics and business solutions — where she oversaw an acquisition portfolio with a $2 billion annual budget.

“It is with profound mixed emotions that I announced my retirement from federal service effective 31 May. My decision was a difficult one, but after over 30 years of rewarding service, it is time for me to focus on my family and loved ones,” she wrote Tuesday in a post on LinkedIn.

“It has been an honor to support our Navy and Marine Corps missions by delivering the capabilities our Warfighters require, and it has been a pleasure to serve among the finest professionals throughout my career. To cap that off, the past seven years as Program Executive Officer (PEO) for Enterprise Information Systems and PEO for Digital and Enterprise Services were an amazing and transformative journey … I am extremely proud of the work we have done together to drive innovation resulting in tremendously positive impacts in the lives of so many Sailors, Marines, civilians, and industry partners,” she added.

Prior to those PEO roles, she served as executive director for communications and information systems and chief information officer for the commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, and executive director for program executive office for command, control, communications and computers, among other positions, according to her Navy bio.

After Youngs Lew’s retirement goes into effect, Louis Koplin, the executive director of PEO Digital, will serve as the acting program executive officer until a permanent replacement is identified, a Navy official told DefenseScoop.

Updated on May 29, 2024, at 2:40 PM: This story has been updated to note that Louis Koplin is expected to serve as the acting program executive officer at PEO Digital until a permanent replacement for Ruth Youngs Lew is identified.

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Known as Project Enigma, the digital environment aims to allow Space Systems Command (SSC) to collaborate with different stakeholders in a multi-enclave, cloud-based shared network. The service awarded GDIT an $18 million other transaction authority agreement in 2023 to develop the prototype digital infrastructure, and the company recently received an extension contract to add more capabilities to the platform, according to Travis Dawson, GDIT’s senior director for Project Enigma.

“This resulting digital services ecosystem will further drive resilient, secure information-sharing to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” Dawson said in an interview with DefenseScoop.

GDIT hosted around 200 government stakeholders for a demonstration of Project Enigma earlier this month at Los Angeles Air Force Base, where the company showcased some of the digital environment’s capabilities, including digital engineering tools, a software factory with DevSecOps pipelines, an IT service management desk and more.

“Working in a government setting and having the ability to sit at one device and do classified and unclassified work on the same device is monumental,” Dawson said. “Rather than having to leave your device and go to a secure facility, login with some classified credentials, etc., you can do that from one device.”

During the event, the company also demonstrated an initial operating capability of Project Enigma’s Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSFC) offering. Approved by the National Security Agency, CSFC allows users to work on classified networks either in-office on a desktop version known as a “trusted thin client” or remotely on a laptop, Dawson said.

“We’re rolling out both of those … right now, putting the trusted clients on the desk within Space Systems Command in L.A.,” he said. “Those provide the ability to securely communicate in … multiple independent levels of security simultaneously from a single device, and it ultimately could be from a remote device.”

The company is currently focused on enabling work in secret-level classified environments. There is some appetite within the U.S. government to add top secret and special access programs (SAP), but the company has yet to begin work on those, Dawson said.

Moving forward on its extended contract, GDIT is currently working on expanding access to Project Enigma beyond those within SSC and incorporating connections with industry partners, he noted.

GDIT also plans to add more mission partners and more commercial cloud service providers to the platform, creating a classified multi-cloud environment for collaboration, he said. While Dawson couldn’t name which cloud service providers would be integrated, he noted that they are companies approved by the Defense Department’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract vehicle. Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Google compete for task orders under the JWCC program.

The addition of commercial cloud is part of a larger GDIT effort known as digital accelerators, Dawson said. The company offers a portfolio of tailored solutions from the commercial sector — from artificial intelligence to cybersecurity — that can be brought into different platforms.

“These are integrated commercial technologies. They have been cyber hardened, and they’re customizable,” Dawson explained. “The customers can go ahead and customize them to their needs and their requirements, and they don’t have to be locked into any type of technology.”

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She will also serve as special assistant for information management, according to a release issued Nov. 3 by Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, and be the principal staff assistant to the SECNAV on information technology, digital modernization, cybersecurity and data management.

Rathbun had been performing the duties of CIO since Aaron Weis departed in March to take a job with Google Public Sector. She oversees the department’s $12 billion-plus IT portfolio including efforts related to cyber readiness, zero trust, cloud and enterprise services delivery, among others.

“Jane’s leadership, technical acumen, and personal character stood out amongst a very competitive field of candidates and represent the best of our ongoing efforts to build a culture of warfighting among our one Navy-Marine Corps team,” Del Toro said in a statement. “She is the right person to drive our efforts to implement the Department of Defense Digital Modernization Strategy and enable our ability to leverage data for decision advantage.”

Before becoming acting CIO earlier this year, Rathbun was the deputy secretary of the Navy for information warfare and enterprise services and the department’s chief technology officer. She’s also held other positions at the Pentagon including deputy director for defense business systems in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for C3, Cyber and Business Systems, according to her official bio.

“I am honored and humbled to serve the DON as the [special assistant for information management] and CIO,” she said in a statement. “I take seriously our mission to build a modern, agile, and adaptive naval information environment that can be leveraged anytime and anywhere to meet the challenges during all phases of competition, crisis, and conflict. I look forward to working with the [chief of naval operations] and [Marine Corps] Commandant to achieving the operational and business outcomes articulated in the NAVPLAN and Force Design 2030.”

Like other Department of Defense components pursuing information-technology modernization, the Navy and Marine Corps are trying to adopt more cloud capabilities, and they recently set up the Neptune Cloud Management Office to help streamline acquisition and delivery of these types of capabilities.

During remarks last month at AFCEA NOVA’s Naval IT Day, Rathbun highlighted some key cloud pursuits, including the Flank Speed initiative.

“In our work with Flank Speed … we actually physically put a cloud on a ship and are extending that enterprise IT concept more to the tactical edge,” she said. “I think that there’s going to be a lot of opportunity going forward to rethink cloud in a tactical environment.”

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Goodwine takes over from Lauren Knausenberger, who stepped down from her position as Air Force CIO in June. Goodwine worked in Knausenberger’s office as the director of enterprise information technology from 2021 until recently taking on the new leadership role.

An official at the Air Force confirmed to DefenseScoop that Goodwine has been the service’s CIO since Aug. 13.

As the department’s CIO, Goodwine will oversee both the Air and Space Force’s enterprise information technology, cybersecurity, and data and artificial intelligence directorates. She will manage a portfolio valued at around $17 billion, according to the department.

She takes over a number of key IT and digital modernization initiatives underway at the Department of the Air Force, including a move to the Air Force’s enterprise cloud environment known as Cloud One and the follow-on expansion called Cloud One Next. Goodwine will also be charged with the department’s efforts to enhance cybersecurity through zero-trust frameworks.

Prior to her time at the Department of the Air Force, Goodwine worked as CISO for the Department of Agriculture, where she managed $208 million annually in cybersecurity expenditures throughout the agency, according to her biography on the service’s website.

Goodwine is also an Air Force veteran, having joined active duty in 1986 and serving as a signals intelligence analyst. She then served in the Air Force Reserves from 2002 until her retirement from uniformed military service in 2022.

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SOCOM and the SOFWERX innovation hub — which is focused on solving special operations forces’ toughest problems — will be hosting a series of events for program executive office SOF Warrior as they hunt for new technology for the Non-Standard Commercial Vehicles (NSCV) program.

America’s most elite warriors sometimes use a variety of souped-up commercial trucks when they want to keep a low profile at overseas operating locations.

“Over time, competing and emerging requirements have driven IT and Comms kits to increase in complexity and cost at the trade-off of Special Operations Forces (SOF) mission flexibility, driving the need to develop an updated strategy and identify new, novel solutions,” according to a special notice released on Sam.gov on Tuesday.

Currently, the command must deploy “tiger teams” to upgrade vehicles’ command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment overseas. But that is expected to be more challenging when troops are deployed in contested environments that are harder for engineers and others to access than the areas where the United States’ most elite warriors have been operating in recent decades.

“As radios, amplifiers and other technologies have evolved over the years, limiting factors and trade-space have made it difficult to adapt mission capability in the field … In future conflicts, [SOCOM] will need the ability to deploy new technology insertion packages in semi-permissive or contested environments,” per the special notice.

Program managers for the family of special operations vehicles want commandos to be able to deploy and adapt technologies overseas “through new deployment strategies and configuration control mechanisms,” and they are on the hunt for “interface control strategies and/or material solutions that enable technology updates in contested or denied areas of operation.”

Additionally, the command expects SOF will increasingly rely on variety of foreign-made vehicles for the NSCV program rather than vehicles manufactured in the U.S. That will increase the need for IT, communications equipment and other tools that can be more easily swapped out and transferred to other platforms.

“The portability of technology packages/kits between vehicle classes and types will be critical to mission success,” according to the special notice.

As part of a multi-phase engagement, on Aug. 30 SOFWERX will host a collaboration event for vendors and officials discuss Special Operations Command’s needs for its family of vehicles. The deadline for organizations to request permission to attend is Aug. 14.

In late September and early October, innovators will be able to submit their technologies for SOCOM review. The command will later make a down-select from those submissions and invite chosen vendors to an assessment event slated for November where they can demonstrate and pitch their capabilities.

Positive evaluations from a SOCOM panel could quickly lead to negotiations for awards, which may include other transaction agreements for prototyping — with the possibility of follow-on production agreements — procurement for experimental purposes, cooperative research-and-development agreements, a Federal Acquisition Regulation-based contract, or other types of awards, according to the special notice.

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The service launched its follow-on effort to Cloud One — known as Cloud One Next (C1N) —  in November with the release of a request for information to inform the program. Feedback from the RFI prompted the Air Force to consider a three-contract modular approach for C1N as of February, although Maj. Gen. Anthony Genatempo, PEO for the Air Force’s command, control, communication, intelligence and networks portfolio, said officials are still working through the acquisition strategy.

“We’re still trying to iron out what exactly that model is going to look like, but I expect we’ll have an RFP released by the end of the summer, so probably the end of August,” Genetempo told DefenseScoop on Monday during a roundtable with reporters at Air Force Life Cycle Industry Days in Dayton, Ohio. 

The team is looking to award the contracts sometime in the spring of 2024, he added. 

Cloud One currently provides enterprise cloud capabilities from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle to the Air Force and wider military. The proposed modernization follow-on effort would extend those cloud services with more providers, regions, networks and classification networks. 

“I’m bringing in a lot of the [chief information officer’s] strategy and pulling together a lot more of our zero-trust implementation, our identity, credential and access management, or ICAM,” Genetempo said.

The Air Force has been on a journey to develop modern ICAM capabilities that enable enterprise zero-trust cybersecurity. In February, the service released an ICAM Roadmap alongside a Zero Trust Roadmap to serve as a guide for its IT modernization efforts. 

ICAM generally comprises a set of information-technology policies and systems that verifies users have the right credentials to access certain parts of a network. As such, it is a critical part of the Air Force’s journey to a zero-trust cybersecurity architecture, which requires all users and data to be continuously authenticated and authorized as they move around the network.

In addition, Genatempo said he’s looking to bring in another DevSecOps software delivery pipeline to C1N similar to Platform One, a software development environment.

“Platform One is instantiated on Cloud One, but I’d like to make that a bit broader for our user base instead of just that specific toolset that Platform One brings,” he said.

Genetempo’s office is also working closely with Air Force Materiel Command, which serves as the data materiel manager for the Air Force, to bring the capabilities that the service’s development teams want to utilize and implement into the cloud, he said.

That means migrating users “out of their singular instances of either their own cloud or their own on-prem or their own contractor-run development cycles, and bring that to a much more centralized place, consolidating the number of networks that we have,” Genetempo said.

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The new contract, which has a value of $7.8 million over nine months, is for prototyping the ATEC Integrated Mission Management System (AIMMS), which is intended to replace legacy platforms, some of which are decades old.

The command, which oversees developmental testing and independent operational tests and evaluations of military capabilities, supports Army Futures Command and other senior leaders as they make critical decisions for acquisition and force modernization.

However, the organization’s thousands of personnel and many installations are spread across the country, which creates challenges. AIMMS is intended to better connect its various elements through improved enterprise IT capabilities and enable its digital transformation with more comprehensive tools.

The command “cannot effectively execute its Test & Evaluation (T&E) mission as test officers/ evaluators … are unable to work across a geographically dispersed organization without a shared system,” according to Army slides for an industry day held in 2021.

The purpose of the AIMMS effort is to “replace the capabilities of several obsolete, siloed, legacy information systems, improve ATEC’s efficiency and effectiveness, and support Army goals to make T&E data more visible, accessible, understandable, linked, trustworthy, interoperable, and secure,” per the slides.

The service expects the new technology to enable test officers and evaluators to initiate, plan, manage, analyze and report on all test-and-evaluation projects; facilitate monitoring and oversight of the command’s various efforts; permit internal and external stakeholders to easily search, discover, access and analyze T&E-related information; and provide a cloud-based application compatible with other Army business systems.

The new system will support more than 3,000 users, according to an Army release last year.

The Project Management Module, ATEC Decision Support System and the VISIOM Digital Library System are some of the older systems slated be replaced by AIMMS.

BigBear.ai, headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, has been selected as the single-source vendor for the final phase of the prototyping effort, which is expected to lead to production if all goes well.

The company “is taking a ‘clean sheet’ approach, leveraging a leading commercial off-the-shelf automation workflow platform, advanced analytics, and AI/ML technologies such as robotic process automation and federated search, in order to drive a higher form of decision intelligence for decision makers,” Ryan Legge, president of integrated defense solutions at BigBear.ai, said in a statement to DefenseScoop.

According to a release, the company will provide the Army with a “modern no-code/low-code solution” for ease of use. It will be a cloud-based, “API-centric” platform combining project and portfolio management, enterprise content management, workflow management, application integration, business intelligence and data analytics capabilities.

“The solution is scalable and secure, and can fully integrate and automate existing and future T&E processes,” according to the firm.

“Our solution will provide ATEC access to essential data, saving time and resources needed to centralize and distribute data,” Legge said in the release.

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