Officials have described becoming more proactive against cyber threats as opposed to a reactive posture, which involves enhancing the training and abilities of the signal corps, improving policies, and developing new concepts and capabilities such as the central delivery of services.

“We’ve been doing cybersecurity operations, but it’s been exceedingly compliance based. Meaning, fill out the checklist … you’re cyber secure. Against a thinking adversary, we know that won’t work,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G6, said in an interview. “We’re really shifting from a compliance-based approach to really be active in cybersecurity operations. That is the big shift that I think you’re seeing not just inside the Army, but across the entire Department of Defense … I think the reason that we pound on cybersecurity operations is really making sure that folks know that we are transitioning from a compliance-based, very passive approach to cybersecurity and rapidly moving to something that’s much more active in the day to day.”

The Army has been on a multiyear journey to mature its network, consolidating the various instantiations from the tactical level and the enterprise to create what the service calls the unified network that soldiers can access all over the world regardless of theater or echelon.

As part of this push, the Army wants to better integrate the functions of cybersecurity and cybersecurity operations — which in some circles are thought of as defensive cyber ops that seek to be more proactive and hunt malicious activity on the network rather than being more reactive to threats.

“This thing that we called cybersecurity operations, really does bleed over into what is defensive cyber operations. I think the big thing that it does is it starts focusing us on being less focused on the administrivia of the day and work focused on the technical risks,” Leonel Garciga, the Army’s chief information officer, told DefenseScoop. “I think that’s really what it boils down to and that’s the distinction. It’s how do we start moving in a direction where we’re more holistically focused on understanding the data that’s being delivered on the network, right, the unified network, and being able to react to that data, whether it be from a threat, or a status of our posture. That’s different.”

Bucketing these notions in this way allows the Army to begin to reduce complexity.

“It allows us to take a look at, okay, so for the basic, the threat agnostic, defensive of our network — read cybersecurity operations — then if we layer that across the unified network, we’re able to now layer in capabilities and force structure, right, so we can put complexity in the right spot,” Morrison said.

One of the major efforts associated with the unified network approach is moving complexity from lower echelons so they can focus on warfighting, not getting their communications or IT established.

Part of that is centralizing the delivery of services and capabilities like Unified Security Incident and Event Monitoring, which aims to provide end-to-end network visibility across all echelons, spanning the strategic enterprise level all the way to tactical formations.

“By moving towards this notion of unified net ops and defense capabilities, we’re now able to layer that on echelon that, quite frankly, we had not been able to see at any other time. We introduced new capabilities like Unified Security Incident and Event Monitoring, that now go across all echelons from strategic, operational, down to the tactical edge, where everybody can see the same thing and then the person with the time to act on it, can then act on it,” Garciga said. “It helps us from a budgetary perspective, it’s going to help us from how we actually organize our forces to conduct cybersecurity operations. And then it’s, quite frankly, going to take that complexity off the edge and give it to folks that actually have time to manage.”

Garciga noted that efforts to modernize the network — whether it’s Risk Management Framework 2.0, new software or new policies — change the nature of cybersecurity itself and thus change the skill sets that are needed.

“As we look moving forward and getting not reactive, but proactive against cyber threats and you’re starting to see that scale out to the traditional part of the Signal Corps and how we deliver services — and that’s an important distinction and change that’s happening as we move to the Army in 2030,” Garciga said. “In many ways as we are moving forward, right, taking this traditional approach to cybersecurity and operationalizing it, is, in effect, increasing the size of what we would call that defensive cyber operating force.”

Morrison described upskilling and reskilling efforts that the Army needs to look hard at for both the military and civilian side of the workforce.

“We’re just in the nascent stages of changing several of our specialties over to be data engineers to really start helping bring all that together at the strategic, operational and tactical spaces,” he said. “Training is really, really, really important. We got the depth we need right now, but I will tell you as this gets more and more inculcated across our Army, we need to build that technical depth across all of our formations.”

The post Army moving away from compliance-based cybersecurity appeared first on DefenseScoop.

In 2021, the DOD decided to officially sunset the Joint Regional Security Stacks (JRSS), an ambitious effort to bolster the overall IT security posture of the department. The program was poised to shrink the attack surface by reducing thousands of stacks globally to roughly 25, which in turn promised to significantly enhance digital protection and provide commanders unprecedented visibility into their networks.

However, the project was marred with countless setbacks and criticism from the contracting community, government watchdogs and Congress.  

“We are working through the sunsetting of JRSS plans right now with all the services,” Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, said at the annual DAFITC conference Wednesday. “I don’t know if we could have made something more complex than we did that.”

Other officials noted its complexity and failure to deliver on promises.

“We’re scarred by the JRSS adventure,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, Army G6, said at the TechNet Augusta conference Aug. 15. “We didn’t seal the deal on how to operate in a completely joint environment where the demarc[ation] between roles and responsibilities was different.”

Skinner said funds have been taken away from JRSS already and the department is committed to a smooth transition.

“What I ask of all those who are leveraging JRSS — you’ve got to get off the snide and you’ve got to get your plan together and start moving out on the plan. I’ll tell you, we do not have the time to have JRSS continue for years because, I’ll tell you, it is older technology, it is very complex and it’s costing a whole bunch. And then if we have to refresh a lot of the capabilities, that’s going to refresh something that we’re going to be sunsetting anyway,” he explained. “Let’s be aggressive but not reckless. The rush to sunset JRSS is on.”

Morrison said in the future, officials need to figure out true integration with sister services and combatant commands.

“What we are really striving to do is not simply figure out what is going to be the interface that allows us to pass the ones and zeros … [but] how do we really make this where we’re integrating with the sister services in the geographic combatant commands so that we can get after this notion of” Joint All-Domain Command and Control, he said, referring to the Pentagon’s new concept for warfare that envisions how systems across the entire battlespace from all the military services and key international partners could be more effectively and holistically networked and connected to provide the right data to commanders for better and faster decision-making.

“I will be candid. In some regards, it’s a little bit of a bottom-up approach right now. But it is something we continue to work with [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] and the Joint Staff to start trying to really lay out what those standard APIs should be. And we don’t want standards per se, but so that we get after this notion of integration,” Morrison said.

One of the main reasons for the decision to move away from the JRSS program was the DOD’s push to adopt zero trust, a concept and framework that assumes networks are already compromised and require constant monitoring and authentication to protect critical information.

The Defense Information Systems Agency’s Thunderdome project — DISA’s zero-trust capability providing network access tools, segmentation technologies, and identity and endpoint capabilities — was initially billed as a key reason to sunset JRSS.

However, Skinner noted that Thunderdome is only part of the agency’s cybersecurity vision.

“Thunderdome is just one area of it. Thunderdome is not a replacement for JRSS. We have to decommission JRSS. And Thunderdome plus other capabilities will still be required,” he said.

The post The rush is on to sunset JRSS, a controversial Pentagon IT program appeared first on DefenseScoop.

“Right now in the Pacific, you can travel anywhere around that [area of responsibility] and plug into the network. By the end of this calendar year, you’ll be able to do it globally and you’ll be able to do it secure,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G6, said at the TechNet Augusta conference Tuesday in Georgia. “Think about it from an operational perspective, a unit told to blowout on some [Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercise] or even a national emergency and getting to the distant end and immediately being able to plug in. We have been talking about that for years.”

Morrison said by the end of this calendar year, units will have global connectivity on the unclassified network. And by the end of next summer, they will have global access to the secret network.  

The Army in years past devised its network to be theater-centric in portions of the world given that’s how it was fighting its conflicts. However, with the global nature of threats today, that old paradigm is no longer tenable.

The Department of Defense experienced this when the 82^nd Airborne Division deployed to Afghanistan to deal with the U.S. troop withdrawal.

For the past three years, the Army has been building toward what it calls its unified network plan, which envisions a singular and global network that forces can plug into anywhere as well as in transit to locations. Previously, it was siloed between the tactical space and remote enterprise locations creating seams in data, communication and connectivity.

As part of the shift toward a unified network, the Army is consolidating the portfolios of some of its program executive offices to ensure all network capabilities are under one roof. This means all the enterprise capabilities that previously existed under PEO Enterprise Information Systems will reside under PEO Command, Control, Communications-Tactical beginning Oct. 1.

“I think it is a great move and absolutely essential to help speed the deployment and continuous modernization of the unified network,” Morrison told DefenseScoop in an interview ahead of TechNet Augusta. “By having it all under one hat, I mean, just think of it from a systems engineering perspective. Now there’s one PEO you can go to so as you’re making a technical adjustment in tactical space, that same PEO is responsible for making sure that is integrated seamlessly into your strategic and operational levels as opposed to in coordination between two PEOs. And quite frankly, with the harmonization of requirements … you get one requirements look to get one materiel development look and it gets delivered and implemented underneath Army Cyber [Command] so it’s now upgraded in a consistent and rapid manner across the globe.”

Next, the Army is looking to ensure it is building division formations that can rapidly plug into the network seamlessly. The Army has recently shifted from the brigade to the division as the unit of action as sophisticated nation states and projected large-scale combat operations will force the military to fight at greater distances and push operations to higher echelons.

When it comes to other network-related capabilities, Morrison noted that the Army will not be transitioning to a classified version of Army 365.

“Army 365 on SIPR, we are not going to do,” he said, referencing the secret network known as Secret Internet Protocol Router Network.

Defense Information Systems Agency Director Lt. Gen. Rober Skinner and “I have been working very, very hard to push the department so that we would have a single tenant, a single joint tenant, on SIPR,” he added. “DISA’s done an incredible job getting that up. It’s already started moving people into that environment and the Army will follow starting in the September timeframe, and we’re going to do it at a fairly quick clip with the goal of being done with the transition by the end of the calendar year.”

The post Army forces will soon have global network access appeared first on DefenseScoop.

“Army Cyber is now going to be providing a capability to meet a users’ requirements and now we will adequately resource it so we won’t have that stovepiped approach,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G-6, told DefenseScoop in an interview ahead of AFCEA’s TechNet Augusta conference next week. “We’re able to focus all those energies and really balance requirements to capabilities to resourcing through Army Cyber. That is fundamentally different than how we’ve done it in the past.”

This effort is part of the Army’s unified network plan, unveiled in the fall of 2021, and aims to link its tactical battlefield networks with its more static enterprise networks for a singular network approach. Previously, the network was comprised of federated siloes that were largely theater-centric and made it difficult to communicate or share data across theaters.

Last year, the undersecretary and vice chief of staff initiated a top-to-bottom audit of the network, dubbed the network capability portfolio review, to holistically examine everything from requirements for unified network operations and cybersecurity to transport, cloud adoption and data analytics as a means of better understanding network components and funding mechanisms as it sought to develop a unified approach.

That effort “really allowed us to see ourselves as an Army,” Morrison said, and “allowed us to see that we had often duplicative requirements, we saw often duplicative technical implementations and we saw, in some cases, duplicative resourcing against very similar requirements and more capabilities.”

As a result, the Army harmonized its requirements, reduced duplication and sought to centralize the delivery of much of its services.

“The network capability portfolio reviews have allowed us to really harmonize our requirements and then prioritize them in a manner in which we really have not been able to do before and align resources. It really is allowing us to accelerate our network modernization efforts towards the notion of the unified network,” Morrison said. “We are shifting to a model where we are going to deliver services and cybersecurity and other capabilities centrally through Army Cyber. That is going to allow us to really collapse all these disparate organizational networks that we have in the Army. We have made great progress in reducing that down and we’re really into the final throes of the last major ones that we really need to do.”

As the Army has evolved from the initial concept of the unified network to actually building it, it has shifted its initial pillars into four strategic priorities, one of which is to reform the security and defense of its information.

The priority states the service is focused on “Modernizing the Army’s cybersecurity posture through the integration of zero-trust principles and other key reforms to ensure the security, integrity, accessibility, and reli­ability of our data, both in transit and at rest.” Morrison is expected to address ongoing progress in building the unified network at AFCEA’s TechNet Augusta conference Aug. 15.

Through the consolidation stemming from the network capability portfolio review, Army Cyber Command will be more tuned into the cybersecurity of the entire network and able to assist units far flung from traditional desktops on the battlefield.

“We now have the ability to see end-to-end into the network in a means of which we’ve never ever been able to before,” Morrison said. “That’s enabling us to remove some of that complexity at the tactical edge and bring it back up. It’s also allowing Army Cyber to provide cybersecurity overwatch to tactical formations and unburdening from that. It’s allowing units to move and plug into the network at a speed that, quite frankly, wasn’t possible only a few years ago.”

One capability the Army is working on is called Unified Security Incident and Event Management, which will provide end-to-end network visibility across all echelons, spanning the strategic enterprise level all the way to tactical formations.

“When a tactical formation plugs back into the network, Army Cyber can see all the way down into those tactical formations,” Morrison said. “If there’s an incident or an event that needs to be managed and dealt with, they’re able to immediately start tipping and queueing units to take certain actions. That is a significant difference from how we’ve done it in the past where we literally were sort of separated by echelons and we didn’t really integrate the solutions to the extent that we have today.”

The post Army network centralization will improve global visibility and cybersecurity, Morrison says appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Two years ago, the Army charted down the path of a unified network, where the walls between the tactical and enterprise portions are broken down, forming a singular entity. Previously, there was a tactical instantiation for soldiers on the battlefield to communicate and share data and a separate enterprise portion.

Under the existing structure, forces had difficulty deploying from one part of the world to the other and immediately plugging into the network given the network was set up in a theater-centric manner.

But now, the Army is beginning to put the pieces together.

“As you look at our actions that we’re taking in [2023] to accelerate, think about things like, again, staying on the theme of central delivery of service, common endpoint management across the entire Army, whether it’s at the tactical edge, or all the way back to the broader strategic and operational levels. What that is allowing us to do is from end to end, see the network in its totality for the very, very first time as we roll that out,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G-6, told reporters at the Pentagon on Monday.

“Think about a formation that’s deploying from one theater to another and being able to rapidly plug in, get connected and fight upon arrival — things that we’ve talked about for many, many years, but now you’re starting to see it actually come to fruition, whether it’s in exercises and/or operations,” he added.

Army Cyber Command will be handling this operational aspect for the central delivery of services and network defense, which Morrison said will result in better use of resources and improved cybersecurity.

He noted that the Army was paying for multiple help desks across the Army over 14 organizational networks. Officials are now in the process of consolidating and collapsing those organizational networks over the next two years.

“We’re going to be able to move towards a single fully resourced help desk that will be not only much more fiscally efficient, it’s going to be more operationally effective, because it’ll be common services for all Army commands and we won’t have these one-offs,” he said. “By collapsing these networks, that’s where you really start seeing this harmonization of a single unified network based off of zero-trust principles.”

A months long review of the network spearheaded by the undersecretary and the vice chief of staff has resulted in the harmonization of requirements to simplify them across the service and portfolios.

With the move toward a zero-trust cybersecurity model, the Army will be able to seamlessly move users around the world regardless of where they’re operating for a common look and feel.

“It was not weeks or even pushing a month, like we’ve seen on previous deployments even as few as five or six years ago. [Recently] as we were pushing units over into Europe, they were getting on the ground and immediately plugging back in to this unified network [and] pulling services from the cloud, based back here in [the continental United States], to support their operations and their deployments over into Europe,” Morrison said, acknowledging the Army still has work to do to get where they want to be with seamless integration.

He noted that the Army will be accelerating efforts in the next couple of years for foundational efforts toward zero trust such as identity credential and access management (ICAM), directory services to log into a network and be authenticated, and Comply-to-Connect.

This operational aspect is just one way the Army is changing its oversight of everything digital, according to Morrison.

Another, and likely highest profile, is the consolidation of elements across two program executive offices. It was announced in March that PEO Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, which handles the tactical network, will absorb items from PEO Enterprise Information Systems to begin to have better resourcing over the entirety of the network.

Fiscal changes are another major element of the shakeup. The service’s portfolio reviews provided an opportunity for the Army to examine its network programs and get a better handle on them from a resource perspective.

“For the first time, we’re really looking at digital spend, whether it’s enterprise, strategic, operational or tactical amongst the various commands. We’re looking at it holistically and then we’re aligning it to make sure that we get the outcomes that we want in the most efficient and effective manner that we possibly can,” Morrison said.

“On the acquisition side, a lot of change. Operationally, a lot of change. Then from the Department of the Army perspective on fiscal oversight and prioritization, a lot of change,” he added. “You really have to take all three legs of the stool to see the amount of change that’s undertaking inside the Army at a pretty quick spin.”

The post Army beginning steps to merge tactical and enterprise networks for seamless ‘unified’ approach appeared first on DefenseScoop.

“We got to be careful about not overcomplicating something. I’d push back on the notion of tactical cloud, because, again, where we don’t want to look at things is strategic, operational and tactical,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G-6, said at AFCEA’s Northern Virginia chapter’s Army IT Day conference on Thursday. “We want to look at a hybrid cloud architecture that includes our tactical formations that are deployed, right, that allows us to leverage the power of the cloud. But really the implementation of cloud capabilities and all that comes with the security and the benefits and the operational benefits you get from containerization and virtualization, etc., right? That’s what we want to get after.”

The Army is pursuing a multi-cloud, multi-vendor hybrid approach. Moreover, its unified network concept stresses the need for a single global network eschewing the paradigm of years past of a theater-centric network that was bifurcated between the enterprise and tactical spheres.

“We have a very well thought out strategy that is premised on a hybrid, multi-cloud, multi-vendor environment. And the Army’s global cloud in cARMY is the foundation of our digital transformation that enables, in many ways, that seamless data sharing between tactical and enterprise system — promoting interoperability by sharing common services and of course, reducing the time that is required to develop software solutions that are needed by our warfighters,” Undersecretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo said at the AFCEA event.

The Army plans to invest over $290 million in cloud migration over the next year, he noted.

Morrison explained that there is a tactical implementation that the Army has to flesh out.

“The work that we must do from an Army perspective are what are those key capabilities that we want to maintain on-prem, I’ll say. And on-prem can be whether we’re doing it at the strategic and operational levels back in garrison, or on-prem could be what we’re keeping in a cloud environment is in the tactical space,” he said. “We’ve got to work our way through that and quite frankly, that’s a journey we’re just beginning.”

The Army doesn’t want to put all of its data in one place where the adversary can disrupt it.

“We, the United States Army, are not going to push all those capabilities into the cloud and go, ‘We’re now going to go into a contested and congested environment and we’re going to rely on everything that’s up in the cloud.’ There’s got to be that balance and that balance is what we’re trying to strike,” Morrison said.

The balance includes what needs to be resident in the command post at echelon, he said, adding that the days of pushing everything to a brigade combat team are long gone.

The Army must have a smart layering of capabilities and data at echelon, which it is working through.

“As you do that layering, quite frankly, we pushed masses of bodies down into the BCTs to aligned all the capabilities we had pushed down. As we raise that complexity up, we’ve got to go back in and rebalance the people so we aligned them appropriate against where the complexity and the capabilities really reside,” he said.

Exercises such as Project Convergence and others in the Pacific, along with operations, have demonstrated the hybrid cloud architecture as the end goal for the Army, Morrison said.

“We’re starting pretty pragmatically. We’re going to focus on the corps is that integrator for the joint fight from an Army perspective and figure out what that looks like,” he said. “Then we’re going to enable the division to really be that unit of action and enabled division maneuver. And then we’ll figure out what the lower echelons need. But the capabilities and the complexities have got to be layered appropriately.”

The post Army’s hybrid cloud approach means less emphasis on ‘tactical cloud’ architecture appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Gabe Camarillo, the service’s undersecretary, instituted the capability portfolio review, along with the vice chief of staff, to examine requirements and budgeting to get a better handle on the entire portfolio as the Army continues to modernize its systems.

Along with “harmonizing” the Army’s requirements, that review also gave way to the idea of centrally delivering services and embracing the business model of “as-a-service.” Those two factors combined, Army’s Lt. Gen. John Morrison said, will allow the service to get soldiers capabilities faster.

“If we are providing a capability from the enterprise and we’ve got unit X that is out there and they are procuring a similar capability that can be satisfied through the central delivery of services, why wait?” Lt. Gen. Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G-6, said during AFCEA Northern Virginia’s Army IT Day conference Thursday. “That is what, quite frankly, Army senior leaders are demanding of us at this point. There is no need to wait if we’ve identified what the requirement is and we’ve got a better way to deliver that to the entire Army that gets after this notion of a unified network, that end-to-end visibility that we can maneuver in a contested, congested environment. Why wait? That’s what we’re embarking on now.”

Morrison explained this “as-a-service” model will require increased collaboration with members of industry.

“I would really like to have a conversation with our industry partners about where we’re getting things as a service or maybe even a mix all the second- and third-order effects that comes with that, especially when it comes to supporting operations,” he said. “Think about the exchange of critical threat information that we will have to have in that hybrid environment, so that we both understand the operating landscape, so that missions and operations cannot be impacted.”

ICAM requirement

Morrison stated that the formal requirement for identity, credentialing and access management, or ICAM, has been slowed down some and has not been completed. However, that is not hindering the work the Army is doing on that front.

ICAM will be a central component for the Army moving forward as it transitions from network-centric to data-centric operations, as well as zero trust. In a data-centric network, the paradigm of protecting the perimeter is not always as necessary as it once was because the data and access to it are protected by encryption and credentialing.

In the next 12 months, the Army has several efforts planned, mainly in the Indo-Pacific region, to pilot zero trust where ICAM is foundational.

“We will focus on the I Corps headquarters and the USARPAC headquarters so we can start extending those zero-trust principles from the enterprise — read strategic and operational levels — down into the tactical levels,” Morrison said. “That is all married up with what we’re doing with the Army data plan and this notion of capabilities that we know we need to iterate and grow — we put it in the hands of units and instead of pulling those back when we’re done with an experiment or an exercise, we’re going to leave it there and quite frankly, allow the unit to continue to iterate.”

Morrison added that the Army plans to leave many of these capabilities with units after pilots and exercises conclude as to allow them to continue experimenting and shaping the capability.  

“I will tell you principally that we need to mature an operational capability, it is providing value-added, leave it with the unit, because that operational demand makes the machine turn much, much faster and quite frankly, leads to a much more refined requirements development and a much more refined adaptive and accelerated capability development,” he explained. “Quite frankly, I think, the chief of staff out at USARPAC said it best: If you’re giving me a capability that I can’t do today, and I’m 10% better, then I’m 10% better. Now think about it, next year and you’re 15%, 20%. But this notion of iterative development is going to be absolutely key.”

The post The Army is embracing central delivery of services appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Gabe Camarillo instituted the capability portfolio review, along with the vice chief of staff, to examine requirements and budgeting to get a better handle on the entire portfolio as the Army continues to modernize its systems.

“They’ve been focused on really aligning Army network investments into a coherent strategy that gives us the capabilities that we need to fight and win against near-peer adversaries,” he said at the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting in Nashville Dec. 7. “We worked really hard over the course of the last several months to lay the groundwork to accelerate investments in certain areas, to drive requirements and to incorporate industry best practices so that our network can be secure, capable and most importantly, adaptable.”

The Army is trying to avoid as much as possible referring to the piecemeal portions of the network such as the tactical and enterprise space, instead envisioning a singular network that spans globally. In October 2021 the Army released its unified network strategy, which posits one network capability that breaks down stovepipes and allows soldiers to connect from anywhere in the world and pass data more seamlessly between forward-deployed forces and DOD offices.

“The siloed nature in which the Army’s network is put together is one of the reasons that we have to transition to a unified network … We had a very bifurcated enterprise and tactical network strategy. Our enterprise network has historically been divided into multiple organizational networks, making the totality of all of it hard to see and importantly, for me, hard to defend as well,” Camarillo said. “Until recently, we did not have an overarching plan to pull all this together. And that’s because different organizations have fielded different capabilities, lacking in many ways that coherence that I talked about, to enable us to deploy and be at home station in an almost seamless way.”

This setup made it difficult for forces to deploy from one area and immediately connect when on the ground, a hard lesson learned when the 82^nd Airborne Division deployed to Afghanistan to deal with the U.S. troop withdrawal.

Following the portfolio reviews, the Army is looking to refine its requirements — which come from several organizations across the Army and Department of Defense — and simplify them from close to 30 from the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System.

“What you will see is a different requirements framework come out of this,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G6, said at the conference. “As we harmonized all these requirements, I will tell you that what we found was we had requirements all over the place for the network. The other thing that you will start seeing is requirements … being turned off as we harmonized around the central requirements and where it is that we really, really want to go.”

The reviews have helped give the Army a sustainable strategy and enabled officials to better view the service from a perspective of a unified network, he added.

“It was all about conducting a review of our requirements and then making sure that we had them harmonized and we had a set path forward to bring unified requirements that really crushed the barriers between strategic, operational and tactical forward. And then we did the work, the hard work of aligning funding to make sure that we were getting after the decisions that were made from a requirements perspective,” he said. “From my perspective, it was the first and only time that we’ve ever taken a look at requirements writ large, no matter where they resided.”

Specifically, Morrison said the reviews have helped the Army align requirements on things such as information transport and compute and store, which will directly impact where the service wants go in developing a hybrid cloud environment.

The most important item is the unified netops information systems initial capability document, Morrison said, because that will be the glue that binds everything they’re putting into the enterprise.

“The glue — how do we define that? It’s really going to be that data infrastructure so we can make sure that we are moving towards data centricity and we are making sure that it’s the data that is key on echelon, not the individual capabilities,” he said.

He noted the work the Army did to identify requirements for the service’s identity, credentialling and access management (ICAM) efforts. This framework will be critical in moving the Army to being data centric as opposed to network centric, which is Army Secretary Christine Wormuth’s No. 2 priority.

“That ability, whether you’re at the edge or you’re at the strategic and operational levels, that as you access the network, and more importantly, as you access applications and then even more importantly, as you access the data, we know exactly who you are and what it is that you’re allowed to see,” Morrison said. “Moving towards that data centric environment is going to be absolutely critical, and unifying that through our requirements approach is even more vital because that will drive everything else that our acquisition teammates go on to develop. Again, we’re not looking at that as enterprise and tactical. You must look at it end to end or else we’ll be off on the wrong path from jump street.”

The post Following network capability portfolio review, Army will have a different requirements framework appeared first on DefenseScoop.

“Over the course of the next year, instead of doing [just] a Project Convergence, we will have over a dozen events where we are individually improving the capabilities there,” Morrison said at an AFCEA Belvoir conference. “Think of a continuous feedback loop between our operators, our developers and, quite frankly, our requirements owners all tightly coupled, so we can move in speed. Because in this domain, that’s how we have to operate.”

Project Convergence is the Army’s contribution to the Pentagon’s technology-driven concept of Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), where sensors, shooters and networks will be better connected to allow warfighters to make smarter and faster decisions.

On the sidelines of the conference, Morrison said these additional events will not replace the larger Project Convergence annual experiment, now in its third year, but rather build on top of it by continuing that work over the course of the year.

Specifically, Morrison’s office will leverage existing exercises in the Pacific with groups like I Corps, U.S. Army Pacific and XVIII Airborne Corps to focus on iterative development to more quickly mature technology and concepts. “And it’s almost exclusively focused on how we’re going to be doing our data operations,” he told DefenseScoop.

This approach is about moving beyond “technology just for technology’s sake” and rather learning how to drive “velocity” to achieve decision dominance and fight faster, Morrison said.

“Because in this domain, that’s how we have to operate,” he said. “Exercises and operations can help us learn and implement. Because learning for learning’s sake is just that — but learning, adapting and implementing is where we must get to. And we’ve got to continue to increase the velocity.”

This differs from the traditional cadence of Project Convergence with roughly a year in between each of the exercises, historically.

“We’re now going to leave [the technology] in place, as opposed to tearing it down and trying to reestablish it the next time that we have a Project Convergence,” Morrison said during his keynote. “We will leave capabilities out with U.S. Army Pacific, in the I Corps, so that we can iteratively continue our development of those capabilities and our operational concepts.”

There’s a “set exercise schedule” that the additional events will follow over the next year, he noted.

Project Convergence 2022 experiments are currently ongoing. This year’s events will “evaluate approximately 300 technologies, including long-range fires, unmanned aerial systems, autonomous fighting vehicles and next-generation sensors, and focus on advancing Joint and Multinational interoperability in future operational environments,” per the Army. It is also integrating joint and international partners, as well as industry, into this year’s events.

Last month, an Army official explained how the service hopes during this year’s iteration to garner a new way for joint task force commanders to be able to assign targets based on data being fed by sensors across all the services.

The post Army planning ‘over a dozen’ events on top of Project Convergence to refine new tech next year appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The Army’s then chief of staff, Gen. Mark Milley, testified to Congress in 2017 that the service’s tactical network as it currently stood — the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical — was too “fragile” and “vulnerable” for future battles against sophisticated adversaries. As a result, Milley ordered an entire review of the network.

Since then, the Army developed a strategy it called halt, fix, pivot: discontinuing capabilities that were not survivable, fixing things that could be useful and pivoting to a new paradigm that was threat informed. That led to a multiyear approach involving the incremental development and delivery of new capabilities to its integrated tactical network, which includes a combination of program-of-record systems and commercial off-the-shelf tools. Those “capability sets” now provide technologies to units every two years, each building upon the previous delivery.

Capability Set 21 was primarily designed for infantry brigades, Capability Set 23 is focused on Stryker brigades, and Capability Set 25 is focused on armored brigades.

Currently, the Army is at an inflection point with several concurrent efforts ongoing: fielding Capability Set 21, conducting testing and experimentation with Capability Set 23, and developing design goals for Capability Sets 25 and 27.

Overall, officials say the paradigm shift has led to success, creating culture change in the acquisition and warfighter community while continuing to get buy-in from senior leadership.

“This process puts capability and warfighting over process,” Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, project manager for tactical radios at program executive office command, control, communications-tactical, told reporters at Aberdeen Proving Ground regarding the new approach. “In five or fewer years a lot has changed. I mean, everything has changed, from the way requirements come in to us, the way we help shape requirements, the way the warfighter is truly shaping requirements.”

Senior leadership wants to field capabilities faster and accept more risk across the entire Army. Gabe Camarillo, the undersecretary of the service, has previously lauded the Army’s embrace of new authorities such as Other Transaction agreements and middle-tier acquisition to accelerate the development of new capabilities.

“This is a marked changing pace for where we were at earlier, and significantly have streamlined to what we call our procurement and acquisition lead time throughout the service,” he said at an August event.

“On the digital transformation side, I talked a little bit about the need to shift culture, approach and emphasis to accelerate what our strategy is to get to a unified network, a hybrid accelerated cloud adoption strategy and then of course, enabling data centric operations,” Camarillo told reporters in August. “What we currently see, especially on the tactical side, is that we’ve made a lot of progress to enable acquisition strategies that will allow rapid adoption of upgraded technology through the capability set fielding process.”

Camarillo, along with the vice chief of staff, have initiated a capability portfolio review of the network “to re-baseline our strategy and how do we assess it against current requirements and emerging requirements so that we could gauge our investments in areas where we might be able to prioritize, accelerate or just simply rationalize our efforts,” Camarillo said.

With a lot of different organizations and pots of money, Camarillo said Army leadership wanted to get their hands around the effort in its entirety.

Fundamentally, senior leadership and the warfighting community are accepting more risk on capabilities to try to avoid taking multiple years to field a single system. The service is looking to leverage commercially available technology along with government science and technology investment to experiment with and deliver capabilities on a much faster timeline while getting solider feedback to improve technology in an ongoing manner.

“This notion of iterative development of capabilities, I think is very, very important, because there’s an element of risk that we’re going to have to assume both from how that capability is going to roll out. Is it going to be 100% capable? 80%? 70%? Well, sometimes 70% of something is way better than what you have,” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G6, said at an event hosted by Defense News at the annual AUSA conference on Wednesday.

“Instead of an episodic soldier touchpoint, how about a routine sustained soldier touchpoint that will drive requirements, that will drive capability development, it will drive procedures and how we conduct operations in ways we probably haven’t thought of,” he said.

Units are now fine accepting less mature capabilities in favor of getting technology faster, officials say.

“Somewhere along the line, people were okay with us rolling in new kit that was not program of record, that didn’t go into this big long [operational test] and people start letting us bring in things,” Daiyaan said. “We get five years to figure it out before it has to roll into a formal program of record. In the past, it was unheard of. Somebody wanted every little slice of that radio to go under some major OT and one big shebang in a big network. We’re changing the culture of our warfighters as much as they’re changing us.”

The capability set approach has also allowed greater flexibility to insert new technology when it becomes available. While there is a roadmap of targeted technologies for each capability set, the Army recognizes there are developments in the commercial world they aren’t aware of. As industry innovates, the Army wants to capture those advancements as opposed to continuing down the same path of development with possibly inferior technology.

“As that next generation of technology comes available commercially … how do we pivot from the next Cap Set to be able to capture and rapidly integrate?” Col. Shane Taylor, project manager for tactical network at PEO C3T, said. “Near peers — they have the same technologies we have. Our advantage is speed and training. How fast can we inject that into a formation?”

Taylor added that it is a more integrated process of learning, which has increased speed.

“It’s what we learned together. The units are involved. We could go slower, more deliberate and give them a very mature solution five years later that would be three years old, or we could go fast and we learned together,” he said. “That’s been the change in paradigm in the approaches.”

The paradigm shift has also brought more entities together in a more holistic manner, Daiyaan said, noting it “made us start to see inefficiencies.”

“In the past, I would deliver my capability on my schedule, according to where my window was,” he said. “But now when we’re looking at a capability set we have someone in [project manager for interoperability, integration and services] that’s just thinking about making sure it all works together. You get a package. It’s almost like walking into the house and the electric is wired together, everything’s WiFi is already turned on, everything is delivered to you as a package.”

Officials described the capability set process as akin to building roads, but for tactical communications and data transmission.

“As we’re going down the capability set execution between 21, 23, 25, I liken it to building that highway. These capability sets are laying the infrastructure foundation,” Nicholaus Saacks, deputy PEO C3T, said. “We’re improving the tactical network infrastructure in order to give commanders a better way to traverse.”

The capability set process allows the Army to keep improving this infrastructure as big ideas, investments or technologies become available.

“We’re doing it a way that’s open so that when we need to add interchanges or … insert new technology and new capabilities, we’re doing it in a way that we can plug those in, so that it’s open and that we can keep competing [with industry] so that down the road whenever that new technology that’s either nascent right now or we haven’t even thought of yet is available and ready to use,” Saacks added. “We can plug it in. Or as the threat evolves, we can we can react and plug in whether it’s a software or hardware solution that counters that directly can get inserted into the network architecture to make it work.”

Industry buy-in

Almost as necessary as getting senior leadership to buy into this new approach is getting industry – which essentially provides the technology — to buy in as well.

Officials described continued responsiveness from industry with the paradigm shift and pushing their innovation efforts based upon signals the Army is sending.

Despite the fact the Army won’t be awarding a single vendor a large program of record in this space for multiple years as was typical previously and favorable for a particular company that came out on top, this incremental and ongoing developmental approach of continual capability insertion allows for more opportunities for contractors.

“What I talk about with industry and it seems to resonate is when you do the 15 year one-and-done competition, it’s great if you win, not great if you lose,” Saacks said. However, “If we are doing these iterations, we keep doing a pulse check on competition. If you are unfortunate and lost that first competition, you have a chance a couple of years down the road … It’s more bites at the apple.”

Taylor noted that this approach forces industry to innovate and iterate because if companies lose, they’re going to have to come back next time with a better design.

The Army has been clear that it won’t always invest its research and development funds into industry’s products. Industry has to bring technologies that have a good deal of maturity because so they don’t need to go through a five- to 10-year iteration.

However, the Army will help industry along. One such way is through the biannual technical exchange meetings, or TEMs. These events, which started around four years ago, gather members of industry, the Army acquisition community, Army Futures Command and the operational community to outline priorities and capabilities to modernize the tactical network.

They differ from the traditional industry days in that they feature panels with acquisition leaders articulating priorities as well as operators explaining what types of capabilities they need to be successful. They are less prescriptive and more descriptive — creating a more collaborative conversation where the Army is acknowledging where they don’t have solutions and imploring industry to innovate to solve problems. While sometimes the Army might be asking for things, industry is also telling the government they should be looking at certain capabilities, which results in more of a two-way discussion.

About half of the TEMs ask for prototype solicitations while the others are intended to help industry shape internal research and development and offer technology roadmaps for future capability sets. 

On average, most TEMs have brought together around 200 companies with a third of those being small business. Moreover, there are more Silicon Valley tech companies and small startups in niche markets participating — creating a greater cross-pollination between commercial firms and traditional defense contractors.

Several companies have spoken favorably of this shift in approach.

“The collective perspectives of senior leaders, operational users and product managers are things that would not be easily understood were it not for these TEMs,” Portia Crowe, Accenture Federal Services’ chief data strategist, said in an email. “The level of transparency and presence of the government folks participating should be the model for industry and government interactions.”

Contractors welcomed this change in doing business, highlighting both the frequency of these events as well as how they’re able to get all the relevant players and stakeholders in one place.

“Prior to the TEMs, occasionally you would attend some different types of events, whether they be trade shows and you might get little snippets of information out of trade shows, or obviously constant engagement with the customer,” Tom Kirkland, vice president and general manager of U.S Army and SOCOM broadband communications systems at L3Harris, told DefenseScoop.

In the past, companies were “having these one-off conversations, if you will, between PEOs and ASAALT and PM shops, so you’re trying to piece the puzzle together … just a little bit as you’re trying to inform your technology roadmaps,” Kirkland said.”Now with the TEMs, you have everybody in one place every six months. It’s streamlined how we engage with our customers and made it a little bit easier for us to make decisions.”

The events have also differed from industry days in that they’re more collaborative and provide more forward-looking insights to give industry a better idea of where to invest, participants say.

“One of the big things for industry is where do we invest,” Greg Catherine, who is part of General Dynamics’ business development team, told DefenseScoop. “We don’t want to invest in something that’s already done and we don’t want to invest so far out in the future that the problem will change before the Army ever gets there. The TEMs give me a good balance in terms of targeting where … I should be spending money on R&D.”

Another unique aspect to these events is perspectives from the actual operators during panels.

Crowe noted that while senior leader perspectives are important, nothing beats hearing from the operators talk about the issues they face.

“This helps us think about problems differently, gives us inspiration to find ways to action on their pain points, and gives us information on how to provide solutions that won’t waste everyone’s time,” she said.

For Catherine, it’s important to hear how the operators are currently solving the problem in the interim and what they need longer term. It provides an opportunity to get ahead of the requirements and better understand what the Army’s words mean versus trying to interpret them without any user input.

The events aren’t perfect, however, and contractors noted they’d like to see more agile ways to obtain contracting funding faster, more joint input on panels and more time allotted so industry can attend all the sessions.

The post Iterative development paradigm shift to fielding network equipment is paying dividends for Army appeared first on DefenseScoop.