Pending accreditation, the chatbot will be deployed to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and allow users to experiment with genAI models on the Secure Internet Protocol Router (SIPRNet), Jeff Marshall, director of DISA’s Hosting and Compute Center, said during a webinar broadcast Tuesday by Federal News Network. The platform is currently in the accreditation stage and is expected to open up “within the next month or so,” Marshall noted.

The capability was developed in close collaboration with the Air Force Research Lab, which launched its own experimental generative AI chatbot for the Department of the Air Force on unclassified networks — dubbed NIPRGPT — last year. Similar to AFRL’s program, AFRL and DISA are using the effort to evaluate and expedite delivery of commercial AI tools, but the agency’s initiative will be in classified realms, Marshall said.

“We’re not trying to deploy this on our own. We’re not trying to make it a production system. This is [a research-and-development] system that we’re using for Indo-Pacom in order to test large language models overseas,” he said.

Across the Pentagon, organizations have looked to capitalize on commercial large language models and other artificial intelligence capabilities. Although there have been various efforts over the last few years — ranging from task forces to experimental platforms — the department is still learning how the technology can be best used to improve back-office and tactical operations.

Marshall noted that DISA’s SIPR-based LLM will largely help “facilitate that demand signal of, what does an Indo-Pacom commander need and want to utilize AI for? And then, how do we then shape that to what industry can actually provide for us at scale?”

DISA plans to host the chatbot on one of the two Joint Operational Edge (JOE) cloud environments it has deployed to the Pacific. Initiated in 2023, the JOE cloud effort seeks to stand up commercial cloud environments at the agency’s overseas data centers, allowing DISA to place cloud-native applications in locations outside of the continental United States. Along with JOE, the agency is also providing its private cloud capability known as Stratus to areas overseas.

To date, DISA has put two JOE cloud nodes at Indo-Pacom and one at U.S. European Command, and will soon deploy another node in Southwest Asia, Marshall said.

Moving forward, DISA is looking to potentially provide additional JOE cloud environments in Europe in order to support operations for U.S. Africa Command, which is headquartered in Germany. But Marshall emphasized the agency is doing so while balancing demand signals with available resources.

“Let’s don’t just throw it all out there one time and hope that it sticks to the wall,” he said. “We’re taking in the demand signal, we’re making sure that there is a valid need that supports us doing the deployment and then, of course, there’s a budget to cover it.”

Updated on March 26, 2025, at 10:35 AM: This story has been updated to clarify AFRL’s role in the new chatbot initiative and to remove “acting” from Jeff Marshall’s job title.

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The JOE effort started in 2023, and the technology has already been put in place at key U.S. military hubs in the Asia-Pacific. DISA is also moving forward with another initiative to deploy the Stratus private cloud at overseas locations.

“OCONUS cloud is both a vehicle for the public cloud to have a joint operational edge — which we call JOE — and there’s also OCONUS Stratus, which we have out in the Pacific, and we also now are just about done with deploying in Europe,” Jeff Marshall, acting director of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Hosting and Compute Center, said Tuesday at an event hosted by Defense One.

“The whole concept is real simple. As you’re in a region outside of the continental United States, you start to have network latency in getting to your data … and you start to see performance drag with the things that you’re trying to accomplish. And when you’re talking about mission partners with mission-critical activities going on in the Pacific or in Europe, you really can’t have those performance degradations. So what these products allow the mission partners to do is actually host their most critical applications closer to them, [with] less latency, and they’re able to get their missions accomplished,” he said.

In June, then Defense Department CIO John Sherman told DefenseScoop in an exit interview that a JOE cloud capability was being set up in Hawaii, another was coming online next in Japan, and the Pentagon was looking at sites in Europe.

It appears that progress has been made on that front.

“We have it deployed in a location and it’s up and running in Hawaii. We’re deploying and it’s in the process of getting prototype workloads on it, and that one is going into Japan. And then we’re also deploying it right now and getting it set up for mission partner prototyping in Europe and out of Germany,” Marshall said.

Hawaii, Japan and Germany each host large U.S. military bases with tens of thousands of personnel and are key overseas hubs for the Defense Department.

Stratus is also up and running in Hawaii and Air Force personnel are already using it, according to Marshall.

While Stratus is a private cloud, JOE is related to the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) offering, which is a public cloud.

In December 2022, cloud service providers Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were awarded contract spots on the $9 billion JWCC program and are competing for task orders.

“JOE is specific to the JWCC public cloud … contract,” Marshall said. “We’re going to have them set up for each CSP, and once that is going to accomplish mission-critical workloads that work best closer to the mission partners outside of the continental United States, we’ll be able to push them out to those nodes, and then the mission partners will be able to utilize that data quicker.”

Although these cloud initiatives aren’t yet connected to the tactical mission partner environment that the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is setting up to boost interoperability with allies, that is a possibility, Marshall suggested.

“It will be eventually. One of the things that is on our DISA Next strategy, as well as the Fulcrum strategy from DOD, is how to better integrate with mission partner environments as well as coalition environments. So this does allow that to be set up so that we can use those as start points for those types of environments as policy comes out around that, that we can then deploy infrastructure in support of,” he said.

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The program is a key element of the DOD’s push for digital modernization. It’s also considered critical to enabling the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) warfighting concept, which aims to better connect the data streams of the U.S. military and key international allies and partners under a more unified network to boost the effectiveness and efficiency of operations.

JWCC replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) initiative. In December 2022, Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were awarded contract spots on the $9 billion JWCC program and are competing for task orders.

The contract vehicle provides the department “the opportunity to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from the commercial Cloud Service Providers,” defense officials noted in an innovation fact sheet distributed on Wednesday.

To date, the Pentagon has executed more than $969 million on JWCC and “has 75 other packages in the process for award,” per the fact sheet.

That dollar value is about 50 percent higher than it was just a few months ago. In May at the DefenseTalks conference presented by DefenseScoop, David McKeown, DOD’s deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity and senior information security officer, said the department had given 84 task orders at that point, totaling $628 million.

The fact sheet released Wednesday didn’t provide a breakdown of how many task orders each of the vendors has won.

Pentagon officials have been encouraging DOD components to embrace the contract vehicle.

“We had a memo put out that said all of the services [and] agencies need to rationalize their contracts for consuming cloud and move to JWCC at first opportunity,” McKeown noted.

Jeff Marshall, acting director of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Hosting and Compute Center, said earlier this week that the initiative is “doing well.”

“It’s a contract vehicle that basically allows mission partners to come to us and be able to get into the cloud without having to do a lot of their own heavy lift to get that set up,” he said during an event Tuesday hosted by Defense One.

“The JWCC allows them to basically get that acquisition vehicle fairly quickly, and then they have something in their hands to work with,” Marshall added. “When I came in, what I saw is that is the push that DISA and DOD was taking everyone into the direction of. And it makes sense. It’s a cloud-first mentality. It definitely is where we should go for elasticity, for scalability and for metering systems, so that people can basically get their workloads and get them where they need them and do them correctly in a cloud environment without having to deal with the infrastructure and those costs and the things that are not part of their core.”

However, DISA is also looking to retool its Stratus cloud offering so that mission partners have better options when it makes more sense for them to use a private cloud instead of a public cloud, he noted.

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials are looking ahead to the next phase of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program, dubbed JWCC 2.0.

Before retiring recently, then DOD Chief Information Officer John Sherman directed the CIO’s team to conduct a review of the entire effort. 

“While I’m a huge fan of it, I know it’s not perfect. Because … we’re kind of figuring out how to walk and chew gum in a multi-vendor environment,” Sherman said during an exit interview in June with DefenseScoop. “What can we do better for JWCC 2.0? Are there things we can put into place to make [software-as-a-service] offerings easier to manage?”

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Pentagon officials have strongly encouraged Defense Department components to use a public cloud environment known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC). But while JWCC had its advantages, it’s not always the best fit for all workloads, noted Jeff Marshall, acting director of DISA’s Hosting and Compute Center.

JWCC is the Pentagon’s high-priority enterprise cloud effort that replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) initiative. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded contract spots under the $9 billion JWCC program in December 2022 and are competing for task orders.

“Whenever anyone talks about cloud and what DISA offers for cloud services, everyone first thinks of JWCC. However, now that it’s been out there for a while it’s time for us to start looking at, is public cloud the right vehicle for every workload?” Marshall said at an event Tuesday hosted by Defense One.

DISA has a hybrid-cloud broker office and officials are looking at customers’ needs rather than approaching it from a one-size-fits-all perspective.

“Maybe they’re already in AWS or Microsoft or Oracle or Google, and they’re realizing that for performance reasons, for data ingress/egress reasons and for security and compliance reasons, maybe not all of their workload actually fits there anymore. And so now what we’re doing is we’re taking a more holistic approach and we’re looking at cloud as a hybrid cloud environment,” Marshall said. “We’re finding that sometimes JWCC and the public clouds is the right space for their workload, but at other times, we find that it’s actually private cloud in our Stratus offering that’s the right workload.”

According to DISA, Stratus provides a multi-tenant, self-service management capability for compute, storage and network infrastructure, including an on-demand web-based portal where customers can manage their resources.

The adoption of Stratus across the department is currently “going OK,” Marshall said.

However, as Defense Department components flock to public cloud offerings such as JWCC, agency officials are looking at ways to improve Stratus to meet the needs of users.

“We’re actually right now, we’re looking at a prototype of retooling it and making it a better private cloud offering to where if you do need boundaries that the public cloud can’t provide you, if you do need performance that you can’t get from there, and if you do need white-glove service you can’t get. And so what we’re doing with Stratus is we’re actually looking at now prototyping a refresh of the infrastructure, and with that, it’s going to be able to give us the ability, within the next year or two, to be able to offer the same set of parameters that we can offer you with JWCC. So we’re going to be able to give you scalability, elasticity and metering within that. So we’re there,” Marshall said.

“We’re moving into that space, and we’re now starting to use the hybrid cloud broker office to go out to mission partners and get that demand signal to try and understand what do you have out there and is it where it should be? Let us help you figure that out. Let us help you determine the metrics around that. And then when it’s ready, we can bring the workloads in that probably should be in a private environment for [various] reasons,” he said.

There are several reasons why it might make more sense in some cases for DOD users to pick a private cloud, according to Marshall.

For example, sometimes the performance needs of mission partners’ workloads are very high.

“It’s a huge database that requires a lot of activity, a lot of moving parts and a lot of infrastructure to support. While JWCC offers those things within the contracts, sometimes mission partners realize that they get very expensive very quickly — beyond what they are willing to pay for. And in those cases, we can generally offer that at a bit better discount for the big items,” he said.

Supportability is another issue. Support from big cloud service providers can come at a tiered cost, Marshall said.

“It gets more expensive for the mission partner, and so when they require a really high level of monitoring, of capacity watch, of just supportability and oversight of whatever that workload is and what it’s on, that’s another use case where we can do it better on a private cloud environment, because we can do what we call white-glove service and really give them a high level of high touch on that,” he added.

Marshall also cited security as a concern that might lead customers to prefer something like Stratus.

“While the CSPs do a great job in that space, sometimes there’s just one or two things that the mission partner is not overly happy about. And so in those cases, bringing it back into a private cloud within our own data centers, on our equipment allows us to better secure it for them,” he said.

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