Next year will mark the fourth iteration of the educational ICAP initiative, which DIU runs in partnership with the Defense Acquisition University. This fellowship is designed to provide DOD’s leading procurement professionals with hands-on experience and virtual training to help them more effectively buy in-demand commercial technologies from non-traditional military contractors. 

“We have other acquisition officers from across the department who can apply to the year-long fellowship with DIU — to learn our process, how we work with industry, and then bring that back to wherever they’re going. And [the next ICAP application] just opened today,” DIU’s Deputy Director for Commercial Operations Liz Young McNally told DefenseScoop during a panel at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+ Expo.

If tapped for the fellowship, personnel will get a chance to work on a variety of real-world, military service-aligned projects alongside a DIU contracting officer, project team and commercial solution providers.

The fellows will also gain in-depth instruction on a flexible contracting mechanism designed for rapid prototyping and acquisition of commercial tech, known as other transaction (OT) authority. That mechanism, as well as DIU’s commercial solutions opening (CSO) solicitation process, helps the Pentagon operate at a pace that is closer to commercial speeds, when buying certain technologies.

Pointing to recent internal DIU stats, McNally said that for roughly 40% of the companies that win a new CSO deal each year, “this is the first time they ever worked with the DOD.”

“We’ve built all of these processes [to accelerate acquisition]. So we’re asking for a problem statement as opposed to a requirement. It’s a short response, right — like a few pages or a few slides, as opposed to something more — very rapid. And [the ICAP fellowship] is one of the processes that we have built to help not just do it ourselves, but then scale it across the department,” she noted.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently issued new guidance to inform how the Pentagon buys software capabilities. In it, he directed Pentagon officials to prioritize OT and CSO procurement options when purchasing digital assets for the military.

“[DIU is] also working very closely with [the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment] and others in the department to implement the president’s new executive order on acquisition. And programs like that fellowship are a real way that we’re going to be able to help upskill, and train, and drive the culture change required so that we bring in more commercial technology,” McNally told DefenseScoop.

Those who wish to apply for ICAP must be permanent government civilians or active component military contracting officers. Each fellow will produce a capstone project that will serve as a training plan for their home organization, based on what they learn throughout the 12-month program.

Applications will be accepted until July 31. DIU aims to notify selected candidates in September and begin the program in October.

“To ensure our warfighters maintain a decisive advantage, we need contracting professionals who are fluent in both the defense and commercial sectors, and who can help their teammates across the department to develop that same fluency. That is what the ICAP fellowship delivers, and we need to keep scaling it — and its impact — for the department’s critical needs,” DIU Director Doug Beck said in a statement.

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Broadly, zero trust refers to a cybersecurity concept and framework that requires non-stop monitoring and constant authentication to secure critical national security information — and assumes all networks are compromised from the get-go.

“We published a reference architecture, a strategy and an implementation plan. The strategy and implementation plan do clearly define what we mean by ‘zero trust’ in the Department of Defense. We have two different layers of achieving zero trust — one is targeted, and the other is advanced. We want to achieve targeted zero trust by 2027. We are an extremely large organization with many networks, and while 2027 may not seem that aggressive, it is super aggressive for us to try to get there by that date,” DOD’s dual-hatted Deputy Chief Information Officer and Cybersecurity and Senior Information Security Officer Dave McKeown said.

During his keynote session at the Zero Trust Summit presented by CyberScoop on Thursday, McKeown provided fresh updates on all that’s currently underway for his team in this pursuit, and he discussed how they aim to soon expand the focus beyond traditional networks and move toward implementation across other types of systems as well. 

“As you would probably agree, the construct of zero trust is important no matter what the network is and no matter what the platform is — medical systems, weapons systems, critical infrastructure — we want to be cognizant of that and finish towards that,” he explained.

DOD points to three methods for achieving zero trust, McKeown also noted. Those include: understanding and uplifting the current environment, leveraging cloud services, and using purpose-built on-premises solutions.

The department’s strategy for achieving zero trust for the target level by 2027 is built around 91 activities.

“What have we done since we implemented the strategy? Well, Congress wanted us and the services to brief them on our overarching plans, so we have been working on those,” McKeown said. 

In November, all Defense Department agencies and military services submitted roughly 40 different cybersecurity approach plans to his team for review.

“We were very, very helpful to them. We gave them the outline of what we wanted them to see back and asked questions in the outline, so that when they delivered their plans back to us all of the things that we needed to see were there. We followed up with them once we received those outlines, and they were very good. I will tell you — the maturity of the understanding of zero trust and what we’re trying to achieve is strong within the department,” McKeown said.

There was a bit more back and forth after that and all the updates that were recommended were eventually made, and then those final plans rolled in at the end of January.

“And we’re now we’re going to create an integrated master schedule — my team is, the Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office that’s led by Randy Resnick — based on all those inputs that we came up with, with Congress, we’re gonna move from the planning phase and educating phase into the implementation phase over the next three years,” the deputy CIO noted.

Once those officials have that completely set integrated master schedule, they’ll focus on enabling appropriate zero-trust training across the department.

“We partnered with the Defense Acquisition University to develop training modules. And they go around conducting live-training events to educate people on what zero trust is. This is a huge effort to shift the whole entire department to a new paradigm for cybersecurity, so the training is totally vital,” McKeown said.

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