Unlike the conflicts in the Middle East of the last 20 years against a technologically inferior enemy, Pentagon officials anticipate contested and congested digital environments where maintaining connectivity will be difficult — a concept known as DDIL, or denied, disrupted, intermittent and limited, in Defense Department parlance.

“Because the bandwidth that’s available in these pLEO satellite connections to our ground control stations is so big, we’re talking hundreds of megabytes of bandwidth with negligible latency, it makes things possible that you couldn’t do anymore. You don’t need to be persistently connected anymore,” Col. Jason Quinter, commander of Marine Air Control Group 38, said during a webcast Monday hosted by C4ISRNET, adding that this also includes the cloud.

In the past, U.S. troops were used to constant connectivity to higher headquarters or to pass data back and forth. Now, they will have to operate somewhat disconnected at times, but these new technologies are providing more bandwidth in those scenarios.

“pLEO is a game changer … That high amount of bandwidth and that low latency really changes what’s possible on modern networks,” Quinter told DefenseScoop in an Oct. 7 interview. “Because the satellites are in low-Earth orbit, you have significantly less latency than you typically would. What that means is it makes certain things possible that wouldn’t [otherwise] be possible.”

These constellations provide orders of magnitude more bandwidth than traditional program-of-record SATCOM capabilities, where forces would have to aggregate connections together to achieve 12 megabytes. Now, troops can have up to 200 megabytes or more depending on how much officials are willing to spend, allowing unprecedented connectivity and data.

Those constellations are also more resilient given there are more smaller satellites in orbit as opposed to a lower number of exquisite, geosynchronous orbit satellite communications architectures.

“Some of our senior leaders used to refer to those [military satellite constellations] as big, juicy targets for anti-satellite ballistic missiles. With the proliferation of these smaller, flat sats in lower orbit, orders of magnitude — four, five, six — and there’s plans for there to be 10-12,000 of these satellites in lower orbit, there’s inherent survivability in that constellation, just from the sheer numbers,” Quinter said in the webcast.

Those connections, however, are easier to jam, and officials have always been careful to warn that their access must factor into what the military describes as a PACE plan — or primary, alternate, contingency and emergency — depending on the operation.

But the enhanced connectivity those constellations provide will allow forces to operate more dispersed and disconnected on the battlefield, a key tenet as observations from current conflicts indicate static units will be much more vulnerable.

“Once you have that kind of bandwidth, you don’t need to be persistently connected. You could establish a hybrid cloud network,” Quinter said.

Quinter served on the Joint Staff’s J6 team when it was developing the overarching concept for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, which envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked to provide the right data to commanders, faster. The word “combined” in the parlance of CJADC2, refers to bringing foreign partners into the mix. He noted that during that process, officials used to say the critical requirement to enable that concept is cloud.

Key to realizing that goal is the DOD’s enterprise cloud contract vehicle, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), the Pentagon’s highly anticipated $9 billion effort that replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were all awarded under the JWCC program in December 2022 and are competing for task orders. Officials in the past have indicated how important this vehicle is to the CJADC2 concept and enabling connectivity and interoperability of forces across the globe.

“We are working with companies … through their cloud environment and trying to establish that hybrid cloud architecture at the edge of the network, which could persist without a connection over pLEO. You could turn that satellite connection on and off as necessary to be more survivable,” Quinter said.

He noted that as long as units have enough processing power and storage at the edge, they don’t need to be constantly connected. They just need to be able to process the information in the field.

“I say ‘hybrid cloud’ because it needs to be both private and public, like we need to be taking advantage of the prime contractors that are on the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract,” he said. “Those will enable us to leverage [a] big data center when we are connected to the enterprise. But we also need to have the hardware at the edge of our network that can handle cloud, hybrid cloud at the edge.”

Quinter noted that the entire DOD is looking at how to get forces to operate more persistently disconnected. He likened a future scenario to submarines that are usually disconnected, but they surface when they need to, download the necessary data and dive back down to resume their patrols.

“We learned that as communicators, that we need to have a PACE plan. You hear other folks from other communities talking a lot more about that now, but I would say that with the technology that’s available right now, you could essentially operate in a no probability to detect, no probability of intercept environment, because hybrid cloud will enable you to do many, many things on the edge of a network that you typically, at least historically, have not been able to do,” Quinter said.

This notion will require a paradigm shift and change in thinking for many service members that have been used to being constantly connected.

“One thing that I have noticed over the last two years in particular, [is] that we have a lot of teaching and educating that we need to do across the force when it comes to cloud,” he said. “I think there’s not enough people that understand how that technology works in particular, which puts us at a disadvantage, because as we’re designing these circuits to install, operate, maintain them in the network in a combat environment, we need to know what’s in the realm possible. I think cloud is not something with that we’re teaching in the schoolhouse yet, but we’re getting there.”

There is a bit of a misconception among many, Quinter added, given cloud is associated with large data centers.

“When people think about cloud, they think about data centers, like back in [the continental U.S.]. In their mind, I think it’s a natural default for most people to think, ‘Well, if I’m not connected to the data center, then how am I using the cloud?’” he said. “That’s what I meant by the level of education that’s required, even across the comm community, for people to understand what is and is not possible when it comes to cloud.”

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The Enterprise Ground Services (EGS) program is the Space Force’s plan to integrate previously stovepiped satellite ground control systems — along with any new satellites entering the service in the future — into a cloud-based command-and-control (C2) suite of services for the Space Force enterprise.

While it is currently operating a hybrid cloud solution, the program has plans to evolve its cloud-based architecture into a hybrid, multi-cloud solution that can accommodate multiple mission partners and greater agility, Brian DeLong, chief technology officer for EGS, said during a virtual event hosted by Federal News Network.

“From a multi-cloud perspective — how do we get more than one government community cloud under our belt so that we can make the right choices to put the right workloads in the right locations with the right connectivity to go after that?” DeLong said.

In its fiscal 2024 budget request to Congress, the Space Force is asking for $155.8 million for Enterprise Ground Services in research and development dollars — $32.6 million more than enacted by lawmakers the previous fiscal year. According to budget justification documents, part of the funding would be directed to the maturation of a “hybrid multi-cloud architecture comprised of on-premise and cloud-based integration and test capabilities at the EGS Canopy lab and operational locations such as Buckley Space Force Base (BSFB), Schriever Space Force Base (SSFB), and multiple cloud environments.”

In the future, EGS plans to support the integration of a number of new missions, such as missile warning and missile defense; MILSATCOM; positioning, navigation and timing, and more, budget documents note. 

As it expands and develops a multi-cloud architecture, the Enterprise Ground Services program is also working on workload mobility capabilities that allow satellite C2 operators to move and migrate data between the various cloud environments in the suite, DeLong said. Given how unpredictable the warfighting domain can be, the ability to pivot workloads between different clouds is crucial, he explained.

“So even though we made the right hosting choice at that time, very quickly that hosting choice may pivot or may change — whether it’s risk posture, whether it’s pricing, whether it’s classification upgrade, a declassification, those types of things across the board,” DeLong said.

And while a multi-cloud approach will allow the Space Force to utilize clouds with different capabilities and classification levels, DeLong emphasized that it also gives the service added security as clouds grow susceptible to adversary attacks.

“What do we do if that capability is trying to be denied? It’s not that the things won’t come back, but it’s our assurance that we have access to the capability when we need it is key,” he said.

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“What I mean by that is the ability for a tactical formation to deploy anywhere in the world and immediately plug back into a secure environment in which they can immediately conduct military operations and allows them to do it so that they don’t have to go through our traditional satellite points of presence,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, the Army’s deputy chief of staff, G6, told DefenseScoop in an interview. “They can get in and as long as they’ve got connectivity, they’re able to plug back into the broader architecture and begin operations. That really is our main effort.”

Last year, the Army unveiled its unified network plan, which essentially charted a path forward to link its tactical battlefield networks with its more static enterprise networks.

An implementation plan followed the plan along with an execution order to treat it like an operation.

One of the key needs driving an approach toward a unified network was the disjointed way forces had network access when they deployed from one part of the world to another, a hard lesson learned when the 82^nd Airborne Division deployed to Afghanistan to deal with the U.S. troop withdrawal.

“With the proliferation of connectivity around the globe, obviously, trying to limit connectivity to one theater is quite frankly, not realistic,” Morrison said.

The Army is now working to harmonize its processes across theaters given that in the past each theater had different operating policies.

As the Army shifts from the brigade to higher echelons as the unit of action — mainly the division — to support operations over greater distances against more sophisticated adversaries, a key initiative for Morrison is reducing the complexity at lower echelons.

“As we shift towards the division as the unit of action, we’re really focused on where does complexity need to be to conduct DODIN Ops and quite frankly, as we move towards a data-centric Army to really do data engineering and all the components that go into making sure that data is available to the right commander at the right echelon, we’re going to really take a hard look at where that complexity is today,” he said.

This will be done by taking a hybrid cloud approach and building the network from the highest strategic levels down the tactical.

“I think that’s a very important point, because we got to be pragmatic about how we actually deploy this hybrid cloud environment and a data architecture that’s going to underpin it,” Morrison said. “What we don’t want to do is how we’ve been building out our capability sets when we build from the [tactical] edge back. We want to make sure that we smartly build it from the strategic and operational levels into the tactical levels, so we don’t induce unneeded complexity at the edge that we then have to re-engineer as we come back to our strategic and operational levels.”

This hybrid cloud architecture will allow units to immediately be able to gain connectivity upon entering theater and then expand capacity once there.

The Army is looking to deploy these tools in experiments and operations to learn as it goes and inform the way ahead.

“We are using the cloud to support exercises and operations, which right off the bat allows you to rapidly plug back in, reach back, grab that mission relevant data that you need and again, without having to set up a bunch of infrastructure on the ground with you, begin operations,” Morrison said. “It’s iterative development of capabilities that allows us to learn a couple of different things: We’ll learn operational TTPs, we’ll learn technical implementations, we’ll learn capability development and bring that all together but being driven by operational units supported by our acquisition teammates and our requirements folks, so that we can get a lot more reps and sets and just iterate far more frequently and get it back to big Army.”

Morrison noted that this notion of a unified network and data centricity, one of the Army’s top priorities, are inextricably linked.

“It all comes down to do you have the right transport and the right hybrid cloud infrastructure underpinned by this notion of a data mesh that really is providing the commander the information that they need at the time they need it so they’re able to make decisions far faster than their adversary and then applying the appropriate operational effects, whether it’s kinetic or non-kinetic,” he said. “That’s the big idea.”

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“We haven’t paid our due diligence to data. We are beginning to have a more disciplined focus,” Lt. Gen. Matthew Glavy, deputy commandant for information of the Marines Corps, said Tuesday at a virtual event hosted by GovConWire.

Advancements in cloud computing are now enabling the Corps to take a “combined arms” approach to data, Glavy said, referencing the notion of mass storage and mass computational power that exists across the enterprise and increasingly at the tactical edge.

“You can’t break all your bad habits overnight, but the idea of massing our data, in the right place, in the right format, using all the appropriate opportunities that DOD has provided us … This is going to be a journey,” he said.

Glavy stressed the need for balance, however. The Corps cannot take data centers with them to the tactical edge. So how will it resolve the issue of getting the right information to the right space at the right time when bandwidth and data could be constrained?

“We’re going to live in a hybrid cloud environment. You’re going to be optimized to fight from the cloud, and sub-optimized to fight on the edge. We will need both,” Glavy said. “We’ll have to weigh those. There’ll be risks that we’ll have to take. We’re not going to bring a data center to the field … This balance of all the goodness of the cloud and [to] be able to operate on a bad day at the edge. Those at the end of the day are probably our biggest concerns on how we are going to be able to operate.”

Additional investments the Corps is looking to make include being able to better sense and make sense of the environment. Part of this relies upon the Corps being the so-called stand-in force for the Department of Defense, which means a persistent presence close to adversaries, but also space-based capabilities.

“Space is critical. Without a doubt, no space, no chance. But also what we’re going to have to be able to do from a terrestrial standpoint to fill in gaps when on a bad day the Marine Corps based on its placement and access can provide that key sensing capability for the joint force,” he said.

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As DIA’s chief information officer, Douglas Cossa is steering that notable revamp of JWICS, a more than three-decades-old system that will evolve to integrate across all U.S. intelligence-aligned components and enable the secure transmission of top secret data and information between them. 

“My role as the enterprise provider for JWICS is to look at where we need those cloud access points and work with vendors around the world to determine where those priorities need to be. Right now, that doesn’t exist. And so that, at least in the near-term, forces us into a hybrid environment where I’m still hosting a lot of that myself in my own data centers. But in the future, I think that will swing the other way, especially as we build that infrastructure with vendors,” Cossa explained during a virtual event Tuesday hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

Cloud access points are essentially the security conduits via which the Defense Department connects to the commercial cloud. Sensors enable DOD components to monitor traffic passing through it.

Operating in a hybrid-cloud environment in the near term, DIA intends to maintain its own data centers and host its own infrastructure, Cossa said, “because, simply, we don’t have connectivity today where those cloud access points need to be put in place in the future,” or it’s so sensitive that officials need more visibility into what’s happening. 

But that’s not the case for all applications. So far, DIA has “certainly taken advantage of cloud services” for back office and business applications, according to Cossa. 

“Things like our contract management system and our HR management system, all of those front-end business services, I’ve essentially moved all of those to the cloud,” he said.

While the intelligence agency can assume some risks associated with modernizing those business functions, the CIO noted that more challenges around data access, identity management, coverage, capacity and security requirements exist with mission-related processes. In those cases, DIA officials need to be able to “see the full threat of security of what’s happening behind the firewall on the vendor side,” Cossa said.

“That’s where we’re going to need to see how that plays out,” he added. “When it comes down to mission data, it’s really going to come down to visibility in a security sense and the access to where those services, that data, that infrastructure, needs to be accessed from. Right now, it does not exist.”

In Cossa’s view, there are also many new opportunities for collaboration between DIA and the United States’ closest international partners — including the Five Eyes coalition nations that are also increasingly turning to cloud-based services. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. are members of that intelligence-sharing group, through which they jointly cooperate on signals intelligence.  

In that sense too, though, challenges around identity management and data access and integration policies remain. 

“And that’s going to be tough — not from a technology perspective, but from a cultural perspective of how we share intelligence given the sensitive nature of it. I mean, it makes sense, but where a lot of the vendor community is going to come in is helping with that integration across cloud services,” Cossa said. “And I really do think that industry is going to lead in data access and the identity management area for the federal government.”

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In December, DISA announced it would sunset milCloud 2.0, transitioning to what it now calls Stratus, which offers a multi-tenant private cloud to meet unique mission partner needs.

Since then, 60 accounts from mission partners have moved to the new platform, Courtnea Johnson, chief of the Cloud Infrastructure Branch at DISA, said Monday during a virtual event hosted by NextGov. She added that DISA has migrated more than 1,700 terabytes of data and more than 820 virtual machines.

“We did this within six months, which is a huge success. Normally, when you look at migration history, it sometimes takes longer — it takes eight months to 12 months to migrate all of the data and all of the virtual machines over to a new platform,” Johnson said. “We’re very proud of the success here and we could not have done this without our mission partners. We partner with them, they trust us and we work directly with them to make this happen.”

Other milCloud accounts and users switched to commercial cloud, closed the accounts completely or moved to Amazon Web Services, she said.

For some, moving to commercial cloud made sense because they were using milCloud as a stepping stone to learn more about cloud environments, Johnson said, especially as the milCloud 2.0 contract vehicle allowed mission partners to purchase AWS cloud credits.

Ultimately, DISA wants to be an honest broker and help mission partners with the cloud, she said, regardless of where that cloud journey leads partners.

“We are truly an honest broker. When we meet with mission partners to partner with them to better understand their requirements, sometimes Stratus might not be the answer for them,” Johnson said. “Sometimes they might be ready to go to the commercial world and not to a private cloud because we’re looking for complex mission partner requirements and we’re looking to assist mission partners to get them to where they should be, which is in the cloud — and that’s commercial cloud or private cloud.”

In terms of next steps for Stratus, Johnson said DISA is looking to expand on the classified network, known as SIPRNet. While Stratus offers SIPRNet, DISA wants to reach out to mission partners to see if they are interested in migrating applications from their current SIPRNet environment to Stratus’.

They are also working on automation to make Stratus a “true self-service cloud.”

“We want to be able to automate everything that we’re doing so we can give mission partners to speed to cloud,” she said.

DISA also wants a utility-based model so mission partners can pay as they go in order to best leverage the benefits of cloud.  

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