Leslie Beavers, who also served as acting DOD CIO for a period at the end of the Biden administration and during the early days of the second Trump administration, will step down as DOD principal deputy CIO at the end of September.

“The Office of the CIO would like to congratulate Principal Deputy DoD CIO Leslie Beavers who announced today that she will be stepping down from her position at the end of September after more than 30 years of uniformed and civilian service,” reads a LinkedIn post from the DOD CIO’s office. “From projects such as Mission Partner Environment and the standup of the Cyber Academic Engagement Office to work to accelerate Identity, Credential, and Access Management enterprise solutions, Ms. Beavers’ unique blend of uniformed, civilian, and private industry experience drove success and innovation.”

Beavers also played a key role in the Office of the CIO’s delivery of its Fulcrum IT strategy in 2024 with then-CIO John Sherman.

In an exclusive interview with DefenseScoop, Beavers detailed the genesis of Fulcrum, which has become the guiding strategic framework for the Pentagon’s IT modernization.

“It was really important to crystallize the department’s vision into what success looks like, which is what we are attempting to do here in Fulcrum because I am trying to get program managers across the department — not just within the CIO organizations, but in all the different weapon systems program offices — to make decisions a little differently, to make them with the user experience in mind, to make them with interoperability as a priority first and really defining what success looks like, and giving them that vision,” she said.

When Sherman stepped down from the CIO role at the end of June 2024, Beavers filled it temporarily until Katie Arrington was appointed to perform the duties of CIO in March. Since then, Beavers retained her deputy role, supporting new efforts under Arrington’s leadership like the Software Fast Track initiative and “blowing up” the Risk Management Framework.

It’s unclear what Beavers’ next role will be after her departure or who will take her place when she officially leaves. DefenseScoop reached out to the Pentagon for comment.

Prior to serving as principal deputy CIO, Beavers was director of intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance enterprise capabilities in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security and an intelligence officer in the Air Force at the rank of brigadier general. She also held roles in the private sector with GE and NBC Universal.

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In the Defense Department, the term “zero trust” refers to a nascent cybersecurity framework and set of 152 activities collectively meant to enable non-stop monitoring and constant authentication to secure critical national security data and information. As its name suggests, the zero-trust concept assumes all networks are compromised from the get-go.

During FedTalks 2024, hosted by Scoop News Group on Tuesday, Les Call — director of the DOD’s Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office — provided the latest update on his team’s unfolding pursuits to drive this implementation, and to continue “progressing at a fast rate.” 

“One of the things about a freight train is, once you get it going, you can’t stop, or it’s very, very difficult to stop. That’s the momentum that we’ve created, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” Call said.

The Biden Administration issued an executive order in 2021 mandating the federal government to secure cloud services and other assets via approved zero-trust approaches. Not long after that, in 2022, DOD’s then Chief Information Officer John Sherman set the department on an ambitious path to implement a fully zero trust-based architecture across its sprawling enterprise by 2027.

Call said Pentagon officials are working closely with a range of industry partners and representatives, including the Cloud Security Alliance, to pinpoint compliant capabilities that can accelerate DOD components’ paths to fully achieving zero trust.

“2024 was the year of concepts. We put together 18 proof of concepts, and three of them we’ve completed. One we’ve actually assessed — and that’s the Navy’s Flank Speed, which assessed the Microsoft cloud service provider network, which was very favorable in zero trust,” Call explained.

He confirmed that his team has also recently linked up with MIT Lincoln Laboratory to put together what he said will be “a proving ground” to continue to assess solutions. 

“We’re actually working on right now and finalizing an actual assessment standard, because you can’t assess zero trust the way you would do a normal red team assessment,” Call said.  

Although he did not provide further details on that effort, Call highlighted some of the CIO’s early progress on zero trust to date. However, he also emphasized the challenges that accompany “changing the culture” of how the Pentagon operates, particularly in terms of technology acquisition and cybersecurity at scale. 

Following Sherman’s recent departure, Principal Deputy Chief Information Officer Leslie Beaver stepped in as acting CIO and subsequently rolled out the department’s new IT advancement strategy called Fulcrum.

Call said that Beavers had been “quietly working on” Fulcrum for two years. The strategy broadly places a sharp focus on agile processes and user experience, and outlines concrete metrics for officials to track tangible progress.

“And so as her philosophy lined up with what we’re doing, it now gives us the opportunity to utilize the hammer — that’s the CIO’s office — to affect this culture change,” Call said.

Before joining the Pentagon in 2023 as its “orchestrator for zero trust,” in his words, Call served as the White House National Security Council’s IT director.

“The DOD is the largest federal organization. When you think of your services, your military including the National Guard and Reserves, you’ve got over 2 million people, over 750,000 civilians made up of 43 separate components — and that covers more than 500,000 facilities across the world. And when you think about securing that vast space and how difficult that is — not to mention what a target that we are — it’s a pretty traumatizing task. And that’s kind of what I thought when I first was introduced a little over a year ago,” he noted.

Still, these measures and the ambitious approach are necessary to deter adversaries like the Chinese government, which Call said is operating on “correlating timelines” as DOD regarding cyber threats and security.

“All of your major [U.S.] intel organizations have reported to Congress to say, ‘Hey, there’s this group called the People’s Republic of China, and they’re involved in all of our critical infrastructure and, oh, by the way, they’re doing this philosophy, which we call Living Off the Land where they’re just kind of camping out, and they’re waiting for the word so that they can create social havoc — meaning you and I could wake up one morning and we have no cell service, we have no power, and the water tastes like chlorine, so we can’t drink it. And then what do we do?’” Call said.

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Now, following the official release of DOD’s new Fulcrum: IT Advancement Strategy on Tuesday, the Chief Information Office-led team that shaped it is moving to mobilize an enterprisewide commitment to the four, integrated directions the blueprint is organized around.

“I’m going to spend the rest of this calendar year making sure that we put in place the right governance structure to help oversee synchronizing the department to move out and deliver in these lines of effort,” Principal Deputy Chief Information Officer Leslie Beavers explained.

In an exclusive interview with DefenseScoop to preview Fulcrum ahead of its publication, Beavers shed light on Pentagon leadership’s vision for carrying out this next-generation IT strategy and what its realization could really look like for DOD.

“It was really important to crystallize the department’s vision into what success looks like, which is what we are attempting to do here in Fulcrum because I am trying to get program managers across the department — not just within the CIO organizations, but in all the different weapon systems program offices — to make decisions a little differently, to make them with the user experience in mind, to make them with interoperability as a priority first and really defining what success looks like, and giving them that vision,” she said.

Lean Six Sigma

CIO leaders aim to expedite DOD’s evolution from a hardware-defined to a more flexible, software-defined enterprise through Fulcrum, which builds on the flagship 2019 defense modernization strategy.

“This is really representing a maturation of that strategy. We were at the five-year point [in] the tech industry, the modernization journey — that’s why it’s not a new strategy. It’s an advancement of the previous strategy. It’s taking into account the new technologies that have been developed and, kind of, the changing world situation and how we are just providing that kind of refreshed vision for how we need to move out in the department in the next five years,” Beavers told DefenseScoop.

Unlike heaps of prior federal strategies, she deliberately ensured that this one wasn’t nicknamed with an abbreviation.

“I didn’t want an acronym — another DMS [for defense modernization strategy], or something like that. That just doesn’t inspire you to, like, want to read it,” Beavers said.

She opted to host “a little competition” amongst DOD colleagues to encourage a creative name for the new guide.

“Whoever came up with the name that I chose, I took to lunch. There were over 40 people involved in writing this document, by the way, from across the department. So this isn’t just Leslie-, or even CIO-team generated. This is a Department of Defense team-generated strategy. And because Fulcrum is at the pivot point between the national security strategies and the defense strategies, how do we translate those strategies into specific actions to take within the department to deliver those capabilities? That’s why Fulcrum really resonated with me when it was one of the proposals,” Beavers explained. 

In the interview, she emphasized that professionally she intentionally pursues a “Lean Six Sigma” managerial approach.

“You start with the customer experience first, and what are you trying to deliver for the end user or the customer? In this case, it’s the warfighter — and my experience over the years with being a reservist and having a lot of connectivity challenges is one of the main reasons why I’m here. So starting with, what does it feel for the warfighter? How we function from a warfighter perspective is most important,” Beavers said. 

In her view, the U.S. combatant commands are Fulcrum’s primary end users.

“We are very closely partnered with the Joint Staff, J6. I look at them as our main conduit into the combatant commands. And when I say ‘warfighter,’ I’m thinking of everybody, from at the combatant command headquarters all the way out to the soldier, or the Marine sitting on an island, isolated somewhere,” Beavers said. 

Broadly, the Fulcrum strategy is structured around four lines of effort that the document states represent “a strategic shift that embraces technology as a mission enabler.” They include:

• LOE 1: Provide Joint Warfighting IT capabilities to expand strategic dominance of U.S. Forces  and mission partners.
• LOE 2: Modernize information networks and compute to rapidly meet mission and business needs.
• LOE 3: Optimize IT governance to gain efficiencies in capability delivery and enable cost savings.
• LOE 4: Cultivate a premier digital workforce ready to deploy emerging technology to the warfighter.

Each of those lines is also supported by a series of strategic objectives that span Pentagon portfolios, which further detail the envisioned way ahead — and indicate clear, measurable mechanisms to trace teams’ progress.

“This really translates strategic vision into tangible actions that the warfighter should feel,” Beavers said.

Typically, government strategies don’t go “down to that level,” she added. But on Beavers’ part, this was purposeful — drawing from her unique background in the government and major corporations, like GE Healthcare and NBCUniversal. 

“[Often] in industry, the pervasive opinion is that if you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business. And in the [DOD], we know certain numbers. But I’m trying to really grow the kind of awareness all the way down into the organization — beyond just the CIO, or beyond just the senior leaders — to get after making tangible progress that they can tell the story on so that they can get the right resources to continue to grow,” the deputy CIO said. “These modernization initiatives and IT have not always been at the forefront of people’s minds as important things to fund, and they really, I think, should be.”

Notably, the launch of this new pathway and plan comes as the Pentagon and military are working hard to realize a number of next-generation initiatives, including but not limited to those to enable the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), and an enterprise-wide cybersecurity approach based on the contemporary concept for zero-trust.  

“We’re facing a whole-of-nation threat, and it requires a whole-of-government, whole-of-nation response,” Beaver noted.

She continued: “So, I really want to foot-stomp that we’re only as good as our weakest link, especially in the cyber world. Taking to heart the cybersecurity and interoperability functionality — that — I need everybody to work on. This is not something that we can do by ourselves. Within the IT workforce, we’re less than 10% of the total workforce. We can’t do it for everybody, so we’ve got to have everybody pile on and help. If they are willing to give me a little bit of time and read Fulcrum, it’s a short read, but it would be very helpful.”

‘The Big Uglies’

Beavers’ unique professional experience spans decades and disciplines.

Her defense career began as an Air Force intelligence officer, and she ultimately retired as a reserve brigadier general. Before she took on this position within the Office of the CIO, she served as the director of intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance enterprise capabilities (ISREC) — where she led Project Herald, the under secretary of defense for intelligence and security’s Defense Intelligence Digital Transformation Campaign.

“That work absolutely influenced the Fulcrum work, because we just built on what we learned from Herald and scaled it up to the department. And so, we did have a lot of participation across the board,” Beavers noted. 

It took six months for dozens of DOD officials to develop, refine and agree upon the final version of the Fulcrum strategy.

“It’s lightning fast [for DOD],” Beavers said.

“I didn’t want a strategy that was in the silos. I needed something that was cross-cutting about delivering for the customer and that user experience, that customer focus is throughout the document. And to do that, you have to think of the outcomes. So, I started assembling that team in January. We really kind of rolled our sleeves up and had 40 people in a room working on it,” she explained.

Outside of her military career, Beavers’ leadership approach is also informed by more than 15 years of experience in multiple private sector industries — including as a vice president at NBC/Universal Pictures tasked with recovering 80 years of broadcast content destroyed in a fire.

“I tend to gravitate towards what I call the ‘big uglies,’ which is a quote that comes out of Disney’s Three Musketeers. Oliver Platt’s character says that when he runs into this guy in the dungeon, he’s like, ‘Oh, big ugly!’ and turns around and runs away,” she explained.

“But I’m the one that stands there and tries to sort out the big uglies and take on the areas that I think are foundational and really important, but maybe don’t get the attention that other kind of flashier options to work on,” Beavers said.

Though she did not refer to it in this way herself, one could argue that a Pentagon-central “big ugly” that influenced Fulcrum was the viral “Fix Our Computers” push.

“I think it’s a natural response. I would have done it without the Fix Our Computers campaign anyway, because I’m in the Fix Our Computers campaign — like, that’s what I’ve experienced. So we are, within the department, very aware of that challenge,” she said.

Now that Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks signed off on this new strategy, Beavers and her team are shifting to a phase where they intend to, as she put it, “mobilize the department-wide commitment to” executing on each of its four guiding inclusions.

“To do that, I’m going to highlight at least one area within each of the LOEs to champion and make sure that the governance processes that I oversee align with driving progress within that area. And so I’m working with the team on that, but [Mission Partner Environments, or MPEs] kind of very top of the list. The cyber workforce is top of mind,” she explained.

Officials involved are also generating even deeper, specific metrics that will be an annex to the overarching plan.

“So for example, if you’re saying, ‘Well my cloud implementation is pretty good, but I want to work on my cyber workforce stuff, what are the metrics? What should I be doing to develop that?’ So that will be coming out,” Beavers said.

Another in-the-works resource that will soon accompany Fulcrum is an associated implementation plan meant to firm up a distinct framework for carrying out the DOD’s fresh strategic vision.

“Then I’ll pick a few flagship efforts to champion, personally, to demonstrate for the department how to do this. Within the DOD, we’re pretty resourceful — and the whole ‘improvise, adapt and overcome’ [notion] is part of our DNA. When you do have these kinds of flagship efforts, other people will pile on. And so I’ll be looking for that to start happening. I think that’ll take another six or eight months before I’ll start seeing a pile on, but that’ll be my next benchmark,” Beavers told DefenseScoop.

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“We are going to call it ‘Fulcrum,’” CIO John Sherman told DefenseScoop in an interview on Wednesday. “The June time frame is when you’ll be seeing some release on that. So, we’re polishing it up and getting it ready.”

The forthcoming document, which Sherman also discussed during his keynote at the GEOINT Symposium, is one of multiple fresh policies and resources his team has been preparing to address issues that continue to impede digital modernization and innovation across the department.

“It represents the department’s ambitious Information Technology (IT) Advancement Strategy designed to leverage the power of technology to drive transformative change and serves as a tipping point for catalyzing digital modernization for the warfighter,” DOD spokesperson Cmdr. Tim Gorman told DefenseScoop in an email on Thursday.

In the interview with DefenseScoop, Sherman elaborated on how the new guide has been coming together.

“We brought together a multidisciplinary team from not only the military services, but some of the other agencies, like the Defense Contract Management Agency, etc., for several on-sites to flesh this out,” he explained.

The Fulcrum strategy will build on the DOD’s 2019 defense modernization strategy, which Sherman said was the flagship document. He confirmed that the Pentagon’s Deputy CIO Leslie Beavers has been leading the development of the new plan, and in doing so she’s working closely with the department’s Customer Experience Officer Savanrith “Savan” Kong.

“This [digital modernization strategy] isn’t going to just be [structured] by functional area, it’s going to be cross-cutting. As we look at different lines of effort like providing capabilities and expanding the Joint Force and combined force dominance, modernizing information networks, IT governance, and building the digital workforce — not just cybersecurity, not just C3, not just cloud,” Sherman said at the GEOINT Symposium.

“And a key enabler in this has been our Customer Experience Office, or CXO. We’ve all heard about the ‘fix our computers’ issues. We took this seriously and we brought some super experts back in from industry and elsewhere as we got after this, and we started to solve hard problems,” he added. 

Sherman entered the intelligence community in 1997 as a CIA imagery analyst assigned to what was then known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. That hub morphed into the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA — and there, Sherman went on to serve in a host of senior executive positions associated with data collection and analysis, homeland security, and more, before he was tapped as DOD’s top IT official.

“As I think about future information technology, again, I harken back to very much of my time in NGA. [The agency] has always had a reputation for being out at the edge. I think about the thousands of deployers NGA has sent downrange over the years, along with our industry colleagues — whether it’s Iraq, Afghanistan, [Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa], Haiti and numerous other places — we’ve always been out at the edge,” Sherman said.

Experiences at NGA “did my heart well,” he said, noting that his time there deeply informed his intent now as CIO to help enable the Pentagon to become a more “rugged, flexible, secure, and resilient” information- and data-driven enterprise.

The new Fulcrum guide is one move he’s making to ensure he can hold his team accountable in accomplishing that aim, he added.

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