Mirroring DoD’s interest, GDIT chief says it’s upping investment in digital engineering

WASHINGTON — With digital engineering increasingly on the minds of military services and the Defense Department as a whole, General Dynamics Information Technology is pouring heavy investments into the area this year.

In an interview with Breaking Defense, GDIT President Amy Gilliland said the company has seen a “demand from customers … to design programs in a digital engineering environment.”

Digital engineering refers to the use of digital models to support the development and testing of a system without the natural limitations of physical development and infrastructure. At a time where technologies are rapidly evolving, digital engineering is viewed as a crucial way to modernize how systems are delivered and sustained. In December, DoD approved instruction 5000.97 [PDF], saying the department “will iteratively develop a digital engineering capability” that will be used by DoD components. 

The new memo came after the Army’s under secretary approved the service’s own digital engineering strategy last September. Through digital engineering, the service wants to move from manual processes to an all-digital environment and develop virtual prototypes before it invests significant amounts of money on delivering physical prototypes.

For the Army, a GDIT spokesperson told Breaking Defense that the company is working with the service on its XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle, providing “model-based software solutions during the engineering and design phases of vehicle production.” The goal is to speed up design cycles and reduce the overall acquisition cost, the spokesman added. Gilliland said the company is also providing digital engineering help to the Air Force, but didn’t say what specific program it was working on.

“These investments have always come from what we’re hearing from the mission and that is fueling the [digital engineering] investment,” she said.

Perhaps a signal of the Pentagon’s piqued interest in the manufacturing technique this year, when Breaking Defense spoke to Gilliland last year, she laid out a handful of areas in which the company was focusing its investments, but digital engineering was not among them. That strategy was, in part, born out of lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Gilliland told Breaking Defense then that the company was increasing its investments by 50 percent across the board in four “solutions,” the first starting with six areas that the Pentagon also deemed critical: zero trust, 5G, artificial intelligence and machine learning, multi-cloud management, software factories and automation for IT operations. The company was also working on increasing investments in quantum computing and defensive cyber operations. 

Those eight areas were part of the company’s digital accelerator portfolio and so far, it looks like the investments have paid off. In late 2023, the company said it had won more than $2 billion in contracts from the portfolio that year.

“So for me that is an affirmation that we’re onto something,” Gilliland said. Beyond single applications of GDIT’s digital accelerators, she said the company is “hearing from our customers is actually they don’t live independently … and so one of the things that we are changing in our mindset in how we’re coming to market and working with our customers in 2024 that is different is we have come up with ways on how to integrate these solutions together. So the $2 billion shows us that we’re moving along the right way.”

Zero Trust At The Edge

Last year was “foundational” for proving out GDIT’s zero trust efforts, Gilliland said. The company demonstrated a zero trust tactical edge capability “in contested battlefield environment with limited or no internet connectivity” to support DoD during Talisman Sabre in Australia, according to a GDIT spokesman. 

GDIT specifically relied on the work it had been doing through a 2022 other transaction authority (OTA) awarded by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) for Identity, Credential and Access Management (ICAM), worth up to $162 million, Gilliland said. 

“It was foundational because we took this OTA that we delivered for DISA on ICAM … and we sent it to the field … because when you are operating at the edge, and this one particularly was in Australia, does this work?” she said. “And so how can we test it? A piece of ICAM is who has entitlement to know what. 

“The whole concept of zero trust is you don’t assume that the inside of your environment is safe anymore and you only give people access to what they need to know,” she added. “And so the same is true in intelligence sharing. So if you’re conducting a multilateral exercise in an environment where you don’t have normal access to comms, how can this tool that you built work?”

The company expanded on those exercises at Yama Sakura 85 last month, a multilateral effort involving the US, Australia and Japan, which “involved monitoring insider threats” using behavior analysis, according to the GDIT spokesperson. Gilliland added the company will also be involved in another exercise in February in the Indo-Pacific region. 

Zero trust is also a major focus of DoD Chief Information Officer John Sherman, who told Breaking Defense last year that a major focus over 2023 would be starting to implement the security concept. In November 2022, DoD released a formal plan outlining what it would take to achieve a baseline level of zero trust across the department by fiscal 2027.

“With zero trust we are assuming that a network is already compromised and through recurring user authentication and authentic authorization, we will thwart and frustrate an adversary from moving through a network and also quickly identify them and mitigate damage and the vulnerability they may have exploited,” Randy Resnick, DoD zero trust portfolio management office chief, said then.