SOF Week 2023

Amy Gilliland (second from right) speaks on a panel at SOF Week in Tampa, Florida, May 11, 2023. (U.S. Navy photo by ITSN Stephen Patzer)

WASHINGTON — General Dynamics Information Technology is pouring more money towards areas that the Pentagon deems emerging and critical to the future of warfighting, like artificial intelligence, in a move that the company president told Breaking Defense is a culmination of lessons learned over the past few years, particularly in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“So what I can tell you is that this is a very deliberate strategy and the journey that we’ve been on over the last couple of years… since COVID, and we have increased our investment this year by 50 percent,” Amy Gilliland said in an interview on Wednesday. “Last year was sort of a ‘Let’s test the strategy and see how quickly we can develop these solutions and see if they are responsive to the requirements that our customers are sharing with us and that we’re seeing in their budgetary lines.'”

The 50 percent jump is across the board in four “solutions,” Gilliland said. The first starts with six areas that mirror many DoD investments lately: zero trust, 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, multi-cloud management, software factories and automation for IT operations. The company is also working on increasing investments into quantum computing and defensive cyber operations. 

The other three areas include investments in the company’s research and development labs, partnerships with commercial companies and workforce development.

“So they are all pieces of the pie. I wouldn’t sit here and say one is drastically more important than the other,” Gilliland said. “They all are pieces of a puzzle that are important to being… responsive to what our customers need, which is the latest that technology has to offer quickly.”

Learning From Kyiv

Gilliland said that coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, GDIT saw that threats continued to evolve from a cyber perspective. A stark lesson came from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which made it clear GDIT’s customers, including DoD, needed to “digitally modernize and harden their environments sooner rather than later,” and the company had to be agile and adaptive to deliver needed tech more quickly.

“A big part of what’s going on in Ukraine, for instance, is the intel that’s being shared amongst the allies,” she said. “And so we serve on contracts, where that is a big piece of what’s happening there. So…we saw a 20-fold increase in the number of intelligence products that were coming out of that area of the world as a result of what’s going on in Ukraine.”

Gilliland said the company worked with its customers to use AI and other technologies to help process intelligence in a matter of months, something that would’ve initially taken “years” to do.

5G For The Military

Elsewhere, GDIT is already doing work with DoD in the emerging technology areas highlighted in the company’s investment strategy. The company formed a 5G coalition last November with Amazon Web Services, Dell Technologies, Cisco, Splunk and T-Mobile to accelerate 5G adoption across federal agencies and is providing connectivity at McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas through its 5G capability called COMET. 

“And so this is particularly with respect to repair and maintenance, and the 5G… solution connected with other technologies, enabled us to be able to automate and provide management of aircraft support and maintenance and then also supply chain logistics,” Gilliland said about COMET. 

Gilliland said she learned the value of responsive tech years ago.

“So I was in the Navy for a period of time on a ship. One of the things that detracts from the mission most is when equipment is down and you have to do maintenance all the time,” she continued. “So if you have a system that can audit [and] automate when you have to do those checks… it allows you to be more efficient in doing that kind of maintenance and that reduces the downtime of aircraft, in this instance for the Air Force, which improves overall operations for the base.”

Zero Trust And A Network In A Truck

The company is also currently deploying its zero trust solution in US Southern Command and won a contract last year to provide zero trust and cybersecurity solutions to the Army National Guard, Gilliland said. Late last year, DoD released its zero trust strategy focused on addressing current and future threats posed by adversaries. That strategy called for implementing a minimal set of zero trust activities across DoD. 

GDIT also recently unveiled a new research and development lab at GEOINT 2023. Essentially a data center in a truck, RAVEN, a Ford F-550 outfitted with servers and computer monitors, was used to collect data in a simulated humanitarian disaster, Defense One reported

Gilliland said RAVEN is “able to ingest technology and respond, and perhaps in that environment there’s not a network or there’s no connectivity, but you have it all in this truck and so you can leverage the power that the technology and AI have to offer in an environment that’s otherwise disconnected, at least in that moment. 

“And then you can certainly analogize that to the mission and maybe being forward deployed and some of those disconnected environments that our military forces find themselves in,” she said. 

‘Understanding Where The Money Is’

Gilliland said that through the new internal investment strategy, the company wants to create digital solutions and have “proven tailorable cyber-hardened options” for its customers. 

“We’re seeing that pay off and that’s based on understanding what customers’ requirements are and having great relationships, reading the budget, understanding where the money is and where customers are interested in investing,” she said. 

A key factor in delivering those requirements will be developing the company’s workforce. GDIT has “really invested in our technical certifications and training and tuition reimbursement to help upskill our workforce because they need to have the skills to deliver these technologies that we are innovating and bringing for our customers,” she added.