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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Central to those efforts is the renewed vision for creating interoperable “Mission Partner Environments” (MPEs), asserts a new Scoop News Group report sponsored by GDIT. MPEs will allow the military and its trusted partners to communicate and share sensitive information securely and in real-time with allied partners.

MPEs represent a logical extension of the DOD’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) strategy to federate, jointly access and act upon relevant situational data. However, according to the report, that strategy is also fueling a new commitment to integrate mission and coalition partners into evolving technical standards, capabilities and policies — and toward a global IT environment rather than a U.S.-centric one.

The conflicts and humanitarian crises in Ukraine, the Middle East and elsewhere across the globe have added new urgency to the need for near real-time information exchange across multiple domains. They have also heightened how modern warfare has taken on new dimensions in contrast to previous conflicts, according to the report, including:

• Hybrid Warfare Challenges — Conventional military tactics are being fused with cyber and information warfare. This blending of domains necessitates seamless data sharing to effectively counter and respond to such multifaceted threats.
• Information Warfare and Disinformation — Adversaries in the Ukraine conflict extensively employed disinformation campaigns to shape perceptions and destabilize regions. Interoperable systems enable partner nations to collectively analyze and counter such narratives, ensuring a more comprehensive and coordinated response.
• Dynamic Battlefield Tactics — The conflict has underscored the rapid evolution of the battlefield, where situational awareness is paramount. Interoperability enables partners to share real-time intelligence, adjust strategies and respond swiftly.
• Civil-Military Coordination — The Ukraine conflict has also highlighted the importance of integrating civilian and military efforts in a comprehensive approach. Interoperable systems facilitate coordination among various agencies, ensuring a more cohesive and effective response.

While the concept of MPEs is hardly new, what’s changing is the need to collapse and improve the speed and effectiveness of an expanding array of networks to share information securely with coalition partners, says Eric Tapp, a 21-year veteran of the U.S. Army, and now MPE lead at GDIT.

“MPEs are moving from this massive point-to-point connection on a standalone network to the point where eventually all warfighters working in NATO or working in a coalition environment will be able to communicate effectively and share data,” he explains in the report. What’s missing, he contends, “is the operational art and the art of deployment.” 

Tapp, who led MPE development at USCENTCOM before retiring from the Army, highlights “the path to modern MPEs” in the report, the critical need for data-centricity and why MPEs must be transport agnostic if they are to fulfill the vision for real-time data sharing with coalition partners.

Read the full report on developing modern ‘Mission Partner Environments” and how GDIT is helping enhance interoperability with global partners.

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

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Consequently, the need for localized, high-speed connectivity capable of securely integrating voice, video, surveillance, sensor and GPS data on the ground plus a high-capacity back-haul to command centers has never been more critical, says Troy Mitchell, a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer with special ops experience, in a new report.

“The clock is against you,” says Mitchell, now a client partner for government at Verizon. That’s where a new generation of lightweight, high-capacity communications equipment, capable of creating a 7-kilometer-wide, high-speed 5G network footprint on the ground — combined with high through-put satellite feeds — promises to add a new dimension of capability for special forces working in remote and austere environments.

Mitchell outlines those capabilities in a new report produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and sponsored by Verizon. The report highlights how “multi-access edge computing” or MEC, combined with portable 5G wireless and satellite communications gear, now going through military demonstration tests, is poised to give special operations teams greater speed, agility and capabilities.

“5G combined with low orbital satellite connectivity makes it possible to erect secure virtual bridges from the edge to the cloud, giving decision makers a superior common operating picture that can literally save lives,” explains Bryan Schromsky, managing partner, 5G Public Sector, Verizon in the report.

“With 5G, it’s now feasible to inject cloud computing and AI capabilities into the decision-making process on the battlefield and give commanders a competitive advantage,” says Schromsky.

The report also highlights how 5G can give special ops teams the ability to create customized logical networks and partitions or network slices. This allows special operations units to establish secure, end-to-end network connections tailored to environmental spectrum and security requirements, including the potential transport of secret and classified data.

Read the report “Enhanced special operations communications in austere environments.”

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

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In a study by George Mason University’s Center for Government Contracting on Wednesday, experts argue that consortia are playing a pivotal role in high-profile and other Defense Department acquisition efforts, and particularly those associated with other transaction authorities (OTAs).  

A consortium typically refers to a group of entities that forms an agreement to cooperate on hard-to-solve problems and achieve common objectives.

But the new research also suggests that DOD must improve how it captures and uses data to fully harness the value of such cadres. 

“It is my sense that the data is not strategically being used on an enterprise level at DOD [regarding consortia]. So, while there may very well be pockets of places that have data on these contracts, or those contracts, or this consortia — or even this area, right, — it is not flowing up in a constantly comprehensive way. That’s step one,” Moshe Schwartz told FedScoop. “And step two, it’s not then being used to inform decision-making.”

Schwartz, a procurement expert who previously served as Executive Director of the congressionally mandated Advisory Panel on Streamlining and Codifying Acquisition Regulations, is now President of Etherton & Associates. He and Stephanie Halcrow — an external advisor to the Department of Defense’s Acquisition Innovation Research Center, senior fellow at GMU’s Center for Government contracting and former Professional Staff Member on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) — provided FedScoop with a first look at this new research they co-authored, ahead of its publication. 

Halcrow noted that during her time as a Congressional staffer, she had so many questions about the process and impact of consortia that seemingly didn’t have answers. “So I thought, this is the report that we want to write that I always wanted to read when I was on the committee,” she said.

In their study, the officials identified 42 consortia supporting agreements, as of May 2022. Of those groups, 38 support the DOD, and four are working with other federal agencies — and 12 of the overall 42 contributed data that informed the experts’ review. 

“I think the biggest challenge that we found in writing this report was getting access to the data to support our findings,” Halcrow explained. “The data exists — but it is not publicly accessible in an easy way.”

Despite that issue, the report incorporates a complete history of the Pentagon’s work with consortia, how the group’s are typically composed and insights into some of the technologies they’ve recently enabled for national security purposes. Three specific use cases depicting consortia-enabled technological innovation are also included. 

In one, DOD used its existing relationship with a medical defense consortium to solicit advanced research and manufacturing of 100 million doses of a vaccine to combat COVID-19. 

“That is so much bigger than DOD, but without the consortia it would never have happened,” Halcrow said.

Ultimately, Halcrow and Schwartz found that consortia bolster engagements between government and non-federal players, expand the defense industrial base — and, in some circumstances, they can significantly speed up acquisition timeliness and promote innovation. 

The co-authors conclude the report by providing seven specific recommendations to improve how DOD benefits from consortia going forward. At the top of that list is their suggestion associated with that gap in data: “improve visibility and transparency.” 

“Part of the conversation around consortia and OTs has been about a lack of transparency and lack of visibility — and one of the questions was, ‘is it that there is no data?’” Schwartz said. But the research showed that “by and large, that data is there and people are generally willing to share it, particularly on the industry side,” he added, “so, let’s see what we can start exposing.”

Among other recommendations, the co-authors also suggested that DOD avoid additional regulatory burdens that could limit consortia, and focus on improving technology transition.

The two are planning an event at George Mason University soon to highlight their findings for the public.

“We would love to talk to as many people about it as possible — be they DOD, industry, academia, Congressional staff, or agencies — because we believe this is an important issue that all of them are interested in,” Schwartz said. “We would love to, I think, do more work in this area both in other events, as well as possibly a follow-on report. So, we’re already talking about that amongst ourselves and seeing if there are opportunities there.”

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