He entered the role in December 2021, a tumultuous era marked by controversy over the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud effort. In the midst of the fallout, Sherman recognized that the department needed to pivot.

“I truly felt we were figuratively fighting and dying on a hill not worth fighting and dying on,” Sherman told DefenseScoop. “All this litigation that we were stuck in and back-and-forth between the several cloud service providers, I felt we were all expending energy against the wrong goals.”

Six months into his tenure as DOD CIO, he made the recommendation to cancel JEDI — a program that sought a single vendor for the Pentagon’s first enterprise cloud capability — and pivot to a multi-vendor acquisition process under what is now known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC).

“That, to me, has been the flagship or one of the top achievements I’ve had as CIO,” Sherman said.

Sherman announced June 6 that he would be departing as Pentagon CIO by the end of the month, moving into a new role at Texas A&M University, his alma mater, as the Dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service.

During an exit interview with DefenseScoop on Monday, Sherman reflected on his nearly three-decade career in government where he often campaigned for novel approaches and technologies to accomplish missions.

“Anytime you’re doing something new, you’re gonna break some glass doing it,” he said.

A ‘digitally focused’ IC

After serving in the Army as an air defense officer in the 24th Infantry Division, Sherman said he was interested in working in the intelligence community and initially applied to be an all-source analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.

But when he received his interview package, he was sent to Building 213 in Washington, D.C.’s Navy Yard where the DOD was standing up the new National Imagery and Mapping Agency — now known as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Sherman was hired as an imagery analyst in 1997, investigating and distributing geospatial intelligence on the Iraqi Republican Guard.

“Working that Republican Guard account for several years will, and continues to be, one of my fondest memories in the IC — working with some amazing teammates in Building 213 supporting U.S. Central Command and other entities with what I thought was insightful analysis during the no-fly-zone days, and then moving to the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom and onward,” Sherman said.

He would spend the next 23 years in the intelligence community, including as the CIA duty officer in the White House Situation Room, an all-source analyst on the National Intelligence Council and a role at the NGA Office of the Americas.

Notably, Sherman was part of the small team that was present in the White House Situation Room on the morning of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

“It was a sobering experience, but also we were honored to be there to support crisis operations on that day,” he said.

In 2014, the CIA was looking to become more “digitally focused,” and Sherman became one of two deputy directors of the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise (OSE) managing the tradecraft of open source intelligence. He led the Middle East and Asia portfolios, as well as the portfolio for emerging technologies where he first began experimenting with commercial cloud capabilities, he noted.

While at OSE, Sherman helped stand up a low-side cloud capability called the Open Source Data Layer and Services (OSPLS). The effort leveraged Amazon Web Services and other capabilities provided by the IC’s Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) program to provide a cloud-based environment for less sensitive and non-critical information.

He detailed how he also took part in the Eyesight Mission Users Group. Although the group’s focus is classified, Sherman said the experience taught him critical lessons on data standards and exactly how cloud technology works.

“What I was able to do was, as one of the initiative leaders, use open-source gathered information to feed into NSA’s gov cloud — which was their part of the classified capability — to then run the compute against this open-source information and find new things that we would not have been able to discover otherwise,” he said.

Sherman was later tapped to serve as the intelligence community’s CIO in 2017, and during his time he initiated several innovative changes that allowed the IC’s IT enterprise to evolve. 

One of those was shifting focus on a program known as the Common IC Desktop Enterprise, which initially looked to create a unified architecture that would allow analysts and officers to move between agencies without the hassle of transferring their data. Despite all of the money and time the IC had already invested into the effort, Sherman said he recognized it wasn’t working.

“It was never going to scale out to being this IC-level capability that it was envisioned to be, and so we pivoted to a federated architecture where we would have standards and then be able to accomplish some of the same interfaces — but not with this unified overall architecture that we were first going along,” he said. 

Another accomplishment as IC CIO was the creation of the Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) program. The intelligence community had been using a single-vendor approach under C2S since 2014, and Sherman initiated the follow-on C2E effort to bring a multi-vendor, multi-cloud capability to the IC in 2020, with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM serving as vendors.

“I’ll also admit this freely — C2E was the model for what became JWCC at DOD,” he said.

Leaning into hard decisions

Sherman was brought into the Defense Department as the principal deputy CIO in 2020, later replacing then-CIO Dana Deasy when he left his position in 2021. Although the department was grappling with many problems with its IT enterprise then, there are still a number of other issues the new CIO who replaces him will face in the future, he said.

“I don’t know what the next hard decision is going to be, but be ready to lean into that,” he said. 

Still, Sherman touted the accomplishments he made during his time at the Pentagon, especially related to the department’s pivot to JWCC and the awards made to Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft for the program at the end of 2022.

He noted that over $700 million worth of task orders across all three security classifications have been awarded through JWCC to date, with organizations like the F-35 Joint Program Office, defense agencies and combatant commands all on board with the program.

JWCC’s growth has also initiated the Pentagon’s new Joint Operational Edge (JOE) initiative to provide cloud capabilities at the tactical edge — a concept he calls the “lily pad.” One JOE cloud has already been installed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, another is coming online next in Japan, and the Pentagon is currently looking at sites for a third one in Europe, he said.

“One of the big things that we talk about a lot with cloud tradecraft is procuring cloud is not the end of the story. You have to learn how to use it, you have to learn how to apply it to your mission,” Sherman noted.

As it prepares for the next phase of the program, dubbed JWCC 2.0, Sherman has directed the CIO’s team to conduct an after-action review of the entire effort. 

“While I’m a huge fan of it, I know it’s not perfect. Because like with C2E, we’re kind of figuring out how to walk and chew gum in a multi-vendor environment,” he said. “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?”

Along with cloud modernization, Sherman has led efforts to improve user experience at the department by creating a UX portfolio management office at the CIO, fix the lengthy authority to operate (ATO) process in response to complaints from industry, and move the Pentagon into adopting a zero-trust cybersecurity framework by 2027.

In a statement to DefenseScoop, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks praised Sherman for positioning the department for success while he served as CIO.

“John tackled some of the most complex challenges in the Department during his tenure, advancing the Department’s information advantage and improving our decision superiority, from the combatant commander down to the platoon leader,” Hicks said. “His leadership on ground-breaking initiatives such as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, Zero Trust Architecture, and the Emerging Mid-Band Spectrum Sharing assessment materially strengthened US national security.”

A key challenge for the department moving forward will be to ensure it is modernizing at the pace it needs to, all while leveraging industry capabilities when it can, he said.

“As we talk big thoughts about edge cloud and transport and zero trust, never forget that it comes down to a service member’s ability or civilian’s ability to do their job — not only at the Pentagon, but out at Osan Air Base in Korea, or onboard a ship in the Red Sea, or at a special forces detachment in Africa,” Sherman emphasized.

Another will be tackling the Pentagon’s growing tech debt, he added. Warfighters are still using a lot of outdated technology from previous conflicts in the Middle East, and Sherman noted that understanding that priority and leveraging the entire enterprise to address it quickly is crucial for the department.

“We’ve got to pay the piper on this because in the digital battlefield that we’ve seen in places like Ukraine and what we could have to face in the western Pacific, these digital IT capabilities are war-winning technologies,” Sherman said. “It’s not just blinky lights and data centers, this is the difference for decision capability for our commanders.”

When asked what advice he would give to the next DOD CIO, Sherman emphasized the importance of working as a team with all of the departments and components at the Pentagon, as well as collaborating with industry as much as possible.

Leslie Beavers, DOD’s principal deputy CIO, will serve as acting CIO as Sherman departs until the department makes a decision on a full-time replacement.

He also pointed to the importance of strong leadership when making hard decisions and setting a clear north star for some of the departments where change might be a heavy lift.

“This has been the greatest opportunity I’ve had professionally, but also I’d be lying if I didn’t say it’s the most challenging,” Sherman said. “So that would be my advice to the next CIO: Buckle your chin strap and get ready, because this is going to be a heck of a ride.”

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The DOD is establishing a user experience portfolio management office under its chief information officer organization, according to a top Pentagon IT official.

The office is in part a response to the viral “Fix Our Computers” open letter from early last year that listed a raft of issues with IT systems – such as comically slow bootup times for computers – demanding DOD address them. It also stems from a Defense Business Board study in February where 80 percent of respondents said the user experience was average or below average.

“We’re standing up the user experience portfolio management office and hiring a senior leader to come in and lead that,” Leslie Beavers, DOD’s principal deputy chief information officer, said at the annual DAFITC conference, adding this is the long-term way ahead on user experience and that the DOD plans to “really take a holistic approach to this to delivering world-class IT to our service members.”

The new office will follow the model of the DOD’s zero trust portfolio management office, led by Randy Resnick, she said.

DOD CIO John Sherman has said since last year that user experience is a top priority for him, following the open letter.

“Working with the other CIOs in the department, we are committed to getting after this — and indeed we are … I can promise you other CIOs are too because this is a multitude of efforts. We have to get after hardware, transport, the software that’s running on the system, all to enhance the user experience,” he said previously, noting that he’s also been on the receiving end of poor user experience.

“I’ve been the guy on the other end of this. If anyone knew me about 25 years ago at the Washington Navy Yard, I was the one running down the hall talking to the staff about why my electronic light table wasn’t working or I couldn’t get my database remarks in.”

Ultimately, Beavers said she wants the systems to work so well that users do not even know who the CIO is because their IT runs so seamlessly.

“My ideal result is you don’t know who the CIO is. Things just work, just like when you go to your house and you turn on the electricity or the water. It just works,” she said. “That’s my ideal end state.”

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The spending blueprint for accelerating digital transformation was based on reviews of the force’s capability portfolios, Undersecretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo said during a briefing with reporters at the Pentagon on Monday when the budget was rolled out.

“If we’re going to be able to fight for more multi-domain operations and to execute the national defense strategy, we have to be able to unlock data, ensure that we have the right skills in place, and to develop the right tools … at the pace that we need them moving forward,” Camarillo said. “There has been a concerted effort over this last year to relook our entire network spend across the Army through a series of capability portfolio reviews. And what that did was allow us to align our FY ‘24 investments in a way that will help us to achieve foundational gains to enable us to accelerate our digital transformation.”

The spending request includes $439 billion to implement the zero-trust cybersecurity model, as well as $95 million for “defensive cyber tools,” according to Army budget documents. The zero-trust paradigm requires organizations to continuously validate network users, devices and data to protect them from threats.

The investments would build and enhance the zero-trust architecture through endpoint security; fund the deployment of identity, credential and access management (ICAM) to support Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and audit; accelerate SIPR modernization for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command; and buy “defensive cyber operations tools.”

Another $469 million would go toward “unlocking access to data” by resourcing the transition to the cloud and other upgrades to the service’s digital environment. About $333 million of that would fund central tools and services for application, development, modernization, cloud migration, and Enterprise Cloud Management Agency (ECMA) support. The other $136 million would be invested in Army data platforms, Application Programming Interface (API) management and data catalogs, to “enable decision through an open data environment,” according to budget documents.

Camarillo referenced the “fix our computers” complaints that have been voiced by DOD personnel, noting that the 2024 budget blueprint includes “significant investment in order to retire technical debt that has accumulated over many years across the DOD, but certainly within the Army, to upgrade user experience and also experiment with pilots that might make it easier for soldiers and civilians in the Army to be able to use the right tools in a way that is very effective for that.”

That includes $394 million for initiatives such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and to replace aging IT infrastructure.

The Army is also looking to better leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning, not just for warfighting capabilities but also on the enterprise side of the house to improve back-office operations and how the service does business, Camarillo noted.

Service budget documents highlight $283 million to fund research and development for “enhanced autonomy experimentation” and program activities enabled by AI and machine learning, including for the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV), robotic combat vehicles, Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN), and “smarter sensors” with edge processing.

The Army also wants $639 million for cryptography modernization including accelerating its tactical radio cryptographic modernization compliance timelines, and supporting the NSA’s “Raise the Bar” strategy for “cross-domain solution integration into critical combat platforms,” per the documents.

Additional money would go toward “upskilling” the workforce.

“There are funded investments to upskill our workforce to bring in software development expertise, cyber expertise within the Army, and to ensure that we’ve got people who have an understanding of the types of best practices that industry employs to help us steer and guide our efforts within the Army,” Camarillo said.

The service wants software development architects with experience in agile software development and commercial sector best practices, as well as acquisition officials educated on key topics such as agile development, cloud, data science, AI and machine learning, per the budget documents.

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Members of the House and Senate armed services committees included the provision in the proposed fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. The move comes after a groundswell of criticisms of the DOD’s basic back-office computing capabilities caught the attention of the department’s top IT leadership and lawmakers on Capitol Hill — part of what’s now known as the “Fix Our Computers” movement.

Voices from across the defense landscape penned open letters bashing the department’s often outdated basic computing hardware and software and pointing to how much time was wasted waiting for a device to boot or an application like basic email to load.

And that’s exactly what the lawmakers are calling on the DOD to explore. If passed into law, the NDAA would require the department to contract with an independent entity to conduct a study on “the challenges associated with the use of software and information technology in the Department of Defense, the effects of such challenges, and potential solutions to such challenges,” says Section 241 of the legislation.

Namely, it calls for a survey across the various military branches to garner more insight into time lost due to these technical impediments and the associated financial costs, the effects on personnel retention, and any negative impact on the missions of the DOD.

The study would also require the creation of a summary of any policy or technical challenges that are holding the military services back from IT reforms that could alleviate the associated issues. This summary would be developed based on interviews with service CIOs or their equivalents across the department.

Finally, the provision requires the creation of a framework for evaluating underperforming software and IT capabilities across the DOD in a standard way and calls for recommendations on how to address the deficiencies.

These elements would be compiled in a report that is due to the secretary of defense and congressional armed services committees within a year of the NDAA’s passage.

Last week, Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, head of the Defense Information Systems Agency, revealed the agency is already conducting a study investigating the effect of cybersecurity on user experience and how it can better harmonize the two.

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But that vision for a technologically advanced U.S. military is at odds with the state of basic computing across the Department of Defense — one where it can take service members across the ranks anywhere from 10 minutes to close to an hour just to log on to their computers and access email.

This reality birthed a moment earlier this year when an open letter penned by Michael Kanaan went viral charging senior DOD leaders to “Fix Our Computers.”

“We’re the richest and most well-funded military in the world. I timed 1 hour and 20 minutes from logging in to Outlook opening today. Fix our computers,” Kanaan, a chief of staff of the Air Force fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and former co-chair of artificial intelligence for the Air Force, wrote in that letter published in January.

The letter is poetic in its prose, delivering the repeated refrain of “fix our computers” like an anthem for the disgruntled rank and file of the DOD.

“Want innovation? You lost literally HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of employee hours last year because computers don’t work. Fix our computers,” it said.

It concludes: “Ultimately, we can’t solve problems with the same tools that made them . . . and yet somehow fundamental IT funding is still an afterthought . . . it’s not a money problem, it’s a priority problem.” He signed it on behalf of “Every DoD Employee.”

The LinkedIn post alone got nearly 2,500 “reactions,” close to 400 comments and was shared more than 200 times.

It also got the attention of CIOs across the Pentagon.

Within days, DOD CIO John Sherman and Kelly Fletcher, his principal deputy CIO, responded with a note of their own, also signed by Air Force CIO Lauren Knausenberger, Army CIO Raj Iyer and Navy CIO Aaron Weis.

“The DoD and Military Department CIOs have taken the dialogue around the need to ‘fix our computers’ at DoD to heart,” it said. “We know there is a lot of work to do to make your user experience better, increase our #cybersecurity, and enable modern office productivity and analytical capabilities. We definitely haven’t been standing still on this point, however, and ensuring we deploy increasingly improving capabilities for you — the folks getting the work done every day in the Department — is our priority.”

This single open letter created an inflection point in challenging the DOD’s IT status quo and launched a movement that reached the C-Suite of the department and military services. Today it continues as an essential part of the conversation around the U.S. military’s efforts to become a more digital force.

A chorus of frustrated users

Kanaan wasn’t the only voice in the conversation. In fact, he was lightyears away from being the first to bemoan DOD’s IT enterprise. And after his letter, many more followed on, echoing his sentiment in their own ways.

Today people continue to do so, nearly eight months later — they’re optimistic for change, but still unsatisfied with the basic tools they’re provided to do the most basic of tasks.

“I don’t know that they’ve made any meaningful progress,” said Bryon Kroger, CEO of Rise8 and a co-founder of the Air Force’s Kessel Run, when asked what’s been done since January.

During his time in the Air Force, officials launched Kessel Run to try to attack the service’s troubles developing software in an efficient and secure way. So, challenges with basic compute disrupted his work regularly.

But, he said, “even people that aren’t doing software development can’t get their work done. It takes them two hours to log into their email — these crazy things that you think are jokes, but they’re not.”

Carl Young, former chief of staff within the Army’s Cyber Center of Excellence, said “it’s a dumb problem to have.”

On any given day, Young said, “it takes anywhere between five minutes and 45 minutes to boot your computer, you know — that no longer makes sense. There are tools capabilities and abilities to solve that problem.”

“The taxpayers don’t pay me to wait 30 minutes for my computer to boot,” he added. “So, there’s the frustration. I’ve got work to do. And frankly you the taxpayer are paying me to do that work.”

Former Air Force Chief Software Officer Nic Chaillan attributed the issue to the slow trickle of tech refresh across the world’s largest bureaucracy.

“The issue is the velocity of updating devices,” Chaillan said. “When you have so many devices out there, people need to rotate devices and different bases buy differently. There was a lot of legacy devices. And those were very, very problematic. So, I think what they’re dealing with is kind of this legacy … it’s just a matter of time for the devices to rotate. And many are prioritizing buying new devices and swapping and stuff. So, it’s already happening. It’s just, when you have, you know, 800,000 devices, it takes time. It’s just what it is — and COVID was not helpful because of the supply chain.”

But as the military moves forward with Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and new AI programs, waiting for new devices to arrive has created incongruities that lead to frustration, or worse.

Young called driving for this high-tech vision but failing to deliver capable basic IT “a logical inconsistency that would drive a lot of us crazy.”

“I think that not only adds to the frustration on a daily basis — which, you know, the jobs are frustrating enough — it also causes you at varying levels, and depending on your personality, to lose confidence in data to make decisions,” Young said. “And so now you still got senior leaders who prefer to use their gut [and] prefer to use instincts, because they don’t trust machines, they don’t trust the data.”

On top of that, it can drive bad cyber hygiene, he noted.

“If my government PC — and pick a classification level — isn’t working, I’m gonna find ways around it. And then I’m gonna, either through omission or commission, do things that aren’t safe … I will get in a hurry and make bad decisions about security because I’m frustrated with what I’ve been given. And that’s dangerous,” he said.

You don’t build a house without laying the foundation first. And many in the defense space feel the same about advanced technology.

“’I say it all the time. Why are we talking about AI and ML?” Kroger said. “We can’t even ship basic web apps. Our users are using whiteboards” instead of collaboration tools. “Why are we talking about AI and ML? Yeah, it’s important. Yeah, to compete with China, we’re gonna need to be able to do it. But before we can do AI and ML, we’ve got to be able to develop web apps. And before we can develop web apps, we need to have computers that work.” 

A pledge to ‘get this right’

Though change may not be coming as quickly as some would like, top IT officials and service leaders continue to pledge they are dedicated to making it right.

“User experience is so important. Yes, I’ve read the ‘Fix Our Computers’ and had a good exchange with Michael Kanaan and others on that,” DOD CIO John Sherman said at FedTalks in August. “We’ve got to get this right.”

Sherman said this is something that’s personal to him, having been in the shoes of the service members who battle their devices every day.

“I’ve been the guy on the other end of this. If anyone knew me about 25 years ago at the Washington Navy Yard, I was the one running down the hall talking to the staff about why my electronic light table wasn’t working or I couldn’t get my database remarks in. So, I’ve been there. But what I will tell you is: Working with the other CIOs in the department, we are committed to getting after this — and indeed we are,” he said, pointing to recent remarks from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall about investments the Air Force is making in basic IT.

“And I can promise you other CIOs are too, because this is a multitude of efforts. We have to get after hardware, transport, the software that’s running on the system, all to enhance the user experience,” he added.

Indeed, though this is a department-wide issue, the Air Force has been perhaps the most vocal about tackling it. Kendall’s counterpart Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown spoke in depth about the Fix Our Computers movement at the Department of the Air Force Information Technology and Cyberpower conference in Alabama last month.

“You’re putting pressure on us, and you should,” Brown said when asked what airmen throughout the ranks are doing to improve IT and cyber. “We’ve got to deliver.”

Speaking to Kanaan’s open letter, Brown explained: “He said what many airmen are thinking. And good on ‘em. We’ve got to put pressure on ourselves to deliver. We can’t keep talking. And if I’ve had one frustration in the Pentagon, it’s the number of briefings I go to where people tell me we can do this or we can do this. I tell them, ‘Don’t tell me what we could do. Tell me what we’re gonna do.’ We’ve gotta drive action. And that to me is important. And this is where many of you come together.”

Air Force CIO Lauren Knausenberger had the metrics to back up Brown’s pledge, saying that since November, the service has boosted IT user satisfaction scores by 19 points, putting it on par with satisfaction levels during the peak of COVID when users were teleworking with reliable equipment from home.

“The department has gotten much more serious about replacing end-of-life equipment, and really cyber hygiene in general,” she said. “Culturally, we’re taking this a lot more seriously.”

The time lost on IT not working the first time has gone down by 50%, Knausenberger claimed, thanks in large part to improvements to applications like Microsoft Outlook and Adobe products.

Sherman, during a fireside chat at the Billington Summit, expressed that it’s a complex problem, one that requires “a team effort.”

“So a lot of you know…some of it’s hardware updates, some of its going to be the software running on the system,” he said. “Some of it can be the image that’s running on the computer there. Some of it is transport, both the long-haul piece [the Defense Information Systems Agency] provides and the on-base kind of last tactical mile bit of transport. And then finally the types of cybersecurity protocols we have running on the computer can conflict with one another, as you all know, if we don’t curate that very carefully.”

Sherman reiterated again that though the issues might seem unimportant to senior IT leaders in the DOD, it’s very much on all of their minds. “The one thing everyone needs to understand: We were those junior officers at one time. And so this resonates with us. There’s not a silver bullet to fix this. But rest assured we are going to fix it and keep our network safe.”

Starting with budget and talent

It’s that type of prioritization and dedication — namely through funding in the budget — to improving basic IT that could lead to change, several observers told DefenseScoop.

“It’s hard to get Congress to fund these things right now — they want to fund F-35s and AI and ML. And next we’ll be talking about blockchains,” Kroger said. “We still don’t have computers that work. That’s a budgeting problem. And everything else is just a reflection of that. In my mind, budget shows me your priorities.”

While Young said he has seen some improvements made, it all happens in siloes among “countless independent little elements” because on a larger scale, there’s no incentive to put resources against the issue.

“Those individuals are working to their abilities independently of one another to try to improve customer service,” he said. “So, there are incremental improvements that are occurring. But from a macro perspective, the budgetary and prioritization incentives aren’t in place for everybody to benefit.”

And others connect it back to the DOD’s struggle to find enough technical talent.

“You can’t expect someone to show up, that has never done it before, in the largest, most complex, siloed bureaucracy on the planet and succeed. It’s literally impossible,” Chaillan said about bringing in experienced talent from the commercial sector to tackle the issue.

He continued: “You have all these capabilities given to you by Congress to hire people from the outside, bring them in and come fix the stuff — do it! Make it a priority; don’t just talk about it.”

Heather Price, a contractor supporting Headquarters of the Department of the Army, likewise wants to take the “Fix Our Computers” conversation and spotlight the need for talent.

“I would just prioritize focusing on talent management before we focus on fixing our computers,” Price said. “We need to fix the [personnel] systems that we have in place to recruit and retain the next generation of talent or we will have all of these fancy high-tech computers, and no one to operate them.”

She continued: “Things like artificial intelligence and Joint All-Domain Command and Control are absolutely vital to our national security. But the foundation of everything we do has to be people. And until we take the focus that this Fix Our Computers movement has generated and shift it towards people, we’re still going to be at risk of falling behind.”

And then, there are some who would just like to watch the world burn. An airman recently made the mistake of seeking technical help on the Air Force’s “AF ALL” listserv — essentially an email group that reaches wide swaths of the service.

With an open opportunity to slam the service’s IT in front of a massive audience, another airman replied to that plea for technical help: “I really have no idea what your issue is or have a good solution to the problem, but here’s a shot anyway: Unplug device, head for second story, open window and throw it out the window, should get rid of the green screen.”

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