CIO Explains DOD’s Advancements in Digital Modernization
DEC. 12, 2019 | BY DAVID VERGUN, DOD NEWS
Protecting the nation’s warfighters and enabling them to win on the battlefield is the driving force behind the Defense Department’s digital modernization efforts, DOD’s chief information officer said.
Speaking at the Air Force IT Day in Washington today, an event sponsored by AFCEA-NOVA, Deasy said the digital modernization effort includes network improvements, including those for command, control and communications, enabled by cloud computing and artificial intelligence, all protected with robust cybersecurity.
The department’s comprehensive digital modernization strategy began in the summer of 2018, Deasy said.
DOD started building the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure environment yesterday, he said. JEDI is cloud computing that will be made available across all services.
JEDI’s unclassified environment will be built over the next two months, he said. Then, about six months later, the secret environment will stand up, followed later by the top secret layer.
Among 14 early adopters of JEDI are the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, U.S. Transportation Command, U.S. Special Operations Command and the Navy, Deasy said. They will test JEDI ”out to the tactical edge across domains” to inform the way ahead, he added.
Deasy also touched on the JAIC’s AI efforts, which have included developing algorithms that were shared with California firefighters who have been busy battling wildfires. These algorithms enable firefighters to detect fire movements and anticipate speed and direction the fire will take, he said, adding that firefighters have said the algorithms have been quite helpful.
The JAIC also will developing AI algorithms for warfighter weapons systems, suicide prevention and health records, he said.
The addition of JEDI and 5G will accelerate the JAIC’s efforts, he predicted.
Deasy also summarized other digital modernization efforts taking place.
This fiscal year, he said, DOD will sign a quadrilateral memorandum of understanding with NATO to integrate digital modernization with allies. Also this year, DOD will develop proposals for 5G network dynamic spectrum sharing, and will begin hosting industry 5G network pilot programs at selected installations, he said.
Other milestones for this fiscal year include developing performance standards for supply-chain risk, issuing a cyber workforce management strategy and meeting compliance for 28 of 30 cyber hygiene metrics to keep data safe, Deasy said.
Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10 Billion JEDI Contract, Thwarting Amazon
By Kate Conger, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane
SAN FRANCISCO — The Department of Defense on Friday awarded a $10 billion technology contract to Microsoft over Amazon in a contest that was closely watched after President Trump ramped up his criticism of Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, and said he might intervene.
[Update: Amazon accuses Trump of “improper pressure” on JEDI contract.]
The 10-year contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, known as JEDI, had set off a showdown among Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Google for the right to transform the military’s cloud computing systems. The acrimonious process involved intense lobbying efforts and legal challenges among the rivals.
The contract has an outsize importance because it is central to the Pentagon’s efforts to modernize its technology. Much of the military operates on 1980s and 1990s computer systems, and the Defense Department has spent billions of dollars trying to make them talk to one another.
The decision was a surprise because Amazon had been considered the front-runner, in part because it had built cloud services for the Central Intelligence Agency. But that was before Mr. Trump became publicly hostile to Mr. Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. The president often refers to the newspaper as the “Amazon Washington Post” and has accused it of spreading “fake news.”
In public, Mr. Trump said there were other “great companies” that should have a chance at the contract. But a speechwriter for former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis says in a book scheduled for publication next week that Mr. Trump had wanted to foil Amazon and give the contract to another company.
The issue quickly became radioactive at the Pentagon. The new defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, at first said he wanted to take several months to review the issue and then, a few days ago, recused himself from the bidding. He said he could not participate because his son worked for IBM, one of the competitors for the contract.
As recently as this month, the betting was that Microsoft would, at most, get only part of the contract and that the Pentagon would use multiple suppliers for its cloud services, as do many private companies. Microsoft was considered in the lead for other government cloud programs, including an intelligence contract; only recently has Microsoft opened enough classified server facilities to be able to handle data on the scale of the Pentagon contract.
“The acquisition process was conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations,” the Defense Department said in a statement on Friday. “All offerors were treated fairly and evaluated consistently with the solicitation’s stated evaluation criteria.”
Microsoft did not immediately have a comment. Amazon, which calls its cloud platform Amazon Web Services, or AWS, said in a statement that it was surprised by the decision.
“AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly led to a different conclusion,” Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon, said. “We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure.”
The award to Microsoft is likely to fuel suspicions that Mr. Trump may have weighed in privately as well as publicly against Amazon. Experts on federal contracting said it would be highly improper for a president to intervene in the awarding of a contract.
Price Floyd, a former head of public affairs at the Pentagon who consulted briefly for Amazon, said he thought Mr. Trump’s vocal criticism of Amazon would give it ample grounds to protest the award to Microsoft.
“He’s the commander in chief, and he hasn’t been subtle about his hostility toward Amazon,” Mr. Floyd said.
Microsoft’s win has implications for the cloud computing industry, in which businesses rent space on technology companies’ server computers, giving them cheap and fast access to storage and processing. Amazon has long been the dominant player, with about 45 percent of the market, trailed by Microsoft with around 25 percent, said Daniel Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities who has closely followed the JEDI saga.
Landing the JEDI contract puts Microsoft in a prime position to earn the roughly $40 billion that the federal government is expected to spend on cloud computing over the next several years, he said.
Losing the bid is also a hit to the reputation of Amazon, which decided last year to open a large outpost in Northern Virginia that will eventually employ at least 25,000 people.
There’s no telling when the Defense Department might finally have its JEDI Cloud up and running. But the Army’s not waiting around for it.
Instead, service IT leaders say they’re already beginning to build cloud architectures of their own that can reach from the office to the tactical edge — a major change to the Army’s fundamental technology infrastructure that is also likely to force it to rethink other aspects of its IT enterprise, including how it buys and develops software.
The Army’s ambitions are embedded in the very name of the new organization the service stood up earlier this year to guide its cloud activities: The Enterprise Cloud Management Office (ECMO). Officials said even though the Army has been consuming cloud services for years — both government ones and commercial ones — there was a clear need to synchronize those activities and scale them across the entire service.
From a technology perspective, the office has three main goals, according to Paul Puckett, the ECMO’s director: Provide cloud-based shared services that the entire Army can use, deliver software development tools that let the Army easily deploy cloud-native applications, and put cutting edge data management and data analytics tools in the hands of end users. Insight by RSA: Federal technology experts discuss how the remote access boom will accelerate both cybersecurity and the validity of the notion that a remote workforce can accomplish the mission in this exclusive executive briefing.
“Those three technical capabilities put together is what we see as a foundational element that all of the Army needs to lean into,” he said last week during an online event hosted by AFCEA. “What we find is that leveraging common services allows us to stop toiling with basic technology, configuration management, and starts to allow us to really start to focus on our applications and our data. We can start to receive feedback from our soldiers in the field and design new solutions and deploy those solutions in real time. All of that requires a secure foundation in the cloud, with common services. It requires the basic tools of modern software development. And it also requires our ability to tap into all of our datasets in real time.”
Along those lines, the Army’s headquarters issued a new data strategy and execute order (EXORD) last November — explicitly framing the new data governance model as a way to support migrations to the cloud.
Puckett said the overall goal is to let the Army “see” itself. Where is its most important data stored as of now? How can it be broken out of the silos where it sits today? If the Army can answer those questions, it can start to build cloud solutions that serve not just its garrison users, but extend all the way to the battlefield.
“These can’t be solutions that are only found in the continental United States where we have 5G, and fiber abounds everywhere,” he said. “We need these capabilities for our ability to have online and demand computing resources even at our tactical edge, even in disconnected environments. In order for us to compete and win, we need to be able to share data from the foxhole to the enterprise and back. And that requires our systems, our architecture and our cloud to be designed and built to be a global asset and not just a capability at the enterprise.”
And even though the Army has a long way to go before it can say its enterprise cloud offerings are truly integrated with said Brig. Gen. Martin Klein, the director of the new Strategic Operations directorate in the Army’s G-3/5/7 organization.
The Army plans to test those concepts at large scale this fall, when it tries to demonstrate the application of AI and other emerging technologies to cloud-based data in a series of experiments called Project Convergence.
“It’s designed to actually get out in physical environments and experiment with the systems that we have,” Klein told reporters this week. “What we’ve found over the course of the last six months in particular is how important the cloud is to doing that. We’ve found that by orchestrating using cloud abstraction layers, we’re actually able to communicate more effectively. It’s really leveraging the information that we have to great effect throughout the Army, throughout the community of interest, whether that be modernization or operations, or frankly, throughout the Joint Force. We’ve found it to be quite liberating.”
If the Army’s ideas about extending cloud services to the tactical edge sound familiar, it might be because they’re quite similar to the goals the Defense Department has articulated for the entire military under its JEDI Cloud program. JEDI, of course, is still tied up in a long-running bid protest litigation saga.
But Army officials assume the cloud services they’re building now will need to fold in with a DoD-wide enterprise cloud at some point. Klein said the Army’s confident they’ll be able to do that, because the applications are being built in a “cloud agnostic” fashion.
“If we go from a Microsoft Azure to AWS or Google, there’s going to be slight variations. But what we’re trying to do is build with those agnostic tools, so that as the department stands up an enterprise cloud we can immediately lift [into it],” he said. “A lot of what we’re doing within experimentation is using sample data and building it at an unclassified level, and then taking that code and lifting it to higher impact levels, getting authorities to operate and authorities to connect in those environments.”
Puckett said whether it’s an Army enterprise cloud in the short or medium term – or the JEDI cloud in the longer term – the move to cloud architectures will require the Army to rethink its approach to developing software.
“We need to lean into true agile methodologies, where we’re not just working in sprints, but fielding solutions early and often in order to improve how we’re meeting the needs of our customers,” he said. “Our ability to receive that feedback and then adapt to it and deploy a new capability requires us to fundamentally change the entire software development lifecycle and how we’re applying that across the United States Army. We’re starting to see really software-defined everything: software-defined data centers, software defined networks, and software is where we see the digital age moving forward. So we really need to have that core competency established, and that gets to the most important piece, which is our people.”
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