US Sailors assigned to the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Carney (DDG 64) stand watch in the ship’s Combat Information Center during an operation to defeat a combination of Houthi missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles, Oct. 19. (US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Aaron Lau)
WASHINGTON — With ongoing conflicts in the European and Central theaters, the Pentagon has placed updating its digital strategies at the top of its list of priorities. As a result, the DoD unveiled ambitious plans in 2024 to rev up its information technology and network capabilities, both at the highest level and within the services.
[This article is one of many in a series in which Breaking Defense reporters look back on the most significant (and entertaining) news stories of 2024 and look forward to what 2025 may hold.]
In June, the Pentagon released a comprehensive information technology strategy, coined the Fulcrum Strategy, that aims to serve as a catalyst for “transformative change” and a “tipping point” for bolstering digital modernization within the Pentagon, according to the strategy.
“Fulcrum prioritizes user experience by driving capabilities that are intuitive, resilient and combat-ready from day one, and we think that’s important because it sort of takes the idea of having a strategy that is more functional base, and then flips it around and have it more warfighter driven,” Leslie Beavers, principal deputy CIO at the DoD told reporters during a media roundtable this summer.
The strategy has four lines of effort:
- provide joint warfighting IT capabilities to expand strategic dominance of U.S. forces & mission partners
- modernize information networks and compute to rapidly meet mission and business needs
- optimize IT governance to gain efficiencies in capability delivery and enable cost savings
- cultivate a premier digital workforce ready to deploy emerging technology to the warfighter
Embedded in the first line of effort was the initiative to implement zero trust principles — the idea that no user should be assumed to be who they say they are. Basically, networks should always be assumed to be compromised.
The Pentagon began putting a heavy emphasis on zero trust after the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act mandated that the DoD completely implement zero trust in its IT, operational technology and defense critical infrastructure by 2027.
First, the Pentagon focused on implementing zero trust for IT, and because the department was able to make strides in this realm combined with past and looming adversarial threats, it has “pivoted” its focus to OT, Randy Resnick, the director of the Pentagon’s Zero Trust Office, told Breaking Defense in November.
“For OT and weapon systems, we are coming out with initial zero trust guidance. Why? Because the adversary is attacking,” he said. “The adversary wants to get into weapon systems to prevent their launch, or mess with the GPS coordinates, so the DoD is looking to initially secure these things beyond what they are today.”
Digital Upgrades At the Service Level: NGC2
While the DoD as a whole appears to be pushing for network and IT resilience, the Army has its own wide-scale plan aimed at creating an integrated command and control structure focused on data centricity at every echelon. The systems of systems approach, called Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) was announced by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in May.
The effort is being led by Army Futures Command, with Gen. James Rainey at the forefront of the effort. While still in the early development stages, NGC2 will create a consolidated network architecture based on a technology stack that AFC officials released in December. This includes an application layer, an operational systems layer, a compute layer and a transport layer.
The point of NGC2: to make things as easy as possible for forces in the field.
The Army is looking to industry to help develop capabilities and technologies that can bring this program to life. In doing so, the service has said that it’s going to stray away from requirements that are too prescriptive.
“We’re continuing to better describe the problem characteristics of the solution space, but still we are not getting prescriptive in a sense of, ‘This is the technology we need, this is the vendor we need to get it from,’ those types of things,” Joe Welch, deputy to the commanding general of AFC said during an interview in December. “It’s still very much in the attributes of the solutions more so than the solutions themselves.”
Additionally, the service said they plan to hire a few team leads instead of having one lead systems integrator.
“Having competition and giving our users opportunities to prototype with more than one solution is potentially powerful, and it also stimulates industry investment, because there’s more opportunities for industry,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for the Army’s command, control and communications-network portfolio told Breaking Defense.
“We certainly want to avoid this incumbency, right? We don’t want an [integrator] who’s going to lead us for the next 10 years, right? We want constant competition. We want constant new teaming.”
