DISA pushes to slash duplication with expansion of JELA program
Up until now DISA was able to create four completed JELAs in the span of 10 years, so creating three more in three years, as is DISA's goal, may prove to be tricky.
Up until now DISA was able to create four completed JELAs in the span of 10 years, so creating three more in three years, as is DISA's goal, may prove to be tricky.
Col. Rich Kniseley said the current plan is to set up a new Space Force working capital fund for buying commercial SATCOM, initially worth about $120 million, on Oct. 1.
Lt. Col. John Hall, DISA's point man on the Pentagon's massive cloud project, told Breaking Defense that having all four cloud providers at Impact Level-6 helps prevent vendor lock and keeps the companies "honest."
“Don’t do [AI] just to say that you have it,” said DISA CTO Steve Wallace. “We’ve seen a lot of vendors who claim to have it, and when you peel back the onion, there’s not a whole lot of depth.”
“We need to make sure that technical debt is not pre-framed as just cost. There's a lot more that comes with technical debt. There's people, there's operational aspect, there's efficiencies," warned Caroline Bean, director of joint enterprise services at DISA.
“The only way that we can actually do our job with the pacing threat of China is to actually add that automation capability," said Brian Hermann, cybersecurity and analytics director at DISA.
The Defense Department wants to explore Large Language Models for everything from paperwork to war plans – without being misled by hallucinations or having sensitive information sucked up by commercial LLMs hungry for training data.
The Defense Information Systems Agency’s five-year plan includes the ambitious goal to build a global network “unconstrained by bandwidth [and] impervious to denial” by hostile forces.
Space industry analyst Todd Harrison said the $3.1 billion purchase is latest in a "shakeup" in the satellite communications landscape following the proliferation of LEO birds.
"It’s great to have internet day to day in peacetime," said Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, "but it’s more imperative to have it when bullets are flying.”
CDAO’s Advana data analytics platform is ingesting data from about 500 DoD business systems.
“Right now we’re going through dealing with some of the security challenges,” Steve Wallace told Breaking Defense. “So I’m hoping the first half of this calendar year. The sooner … the better."
Defense Department Chief Information Officer John Sherman set the tone early in the year by telling Breaking Defense a major focus over 2023 would be aiming for baseline, targeted zero trust within four years.
"What this does today ... is that it provides the ability to bring a number of different information feeds, a number of different data sources together in one picture," Kevin Laughlin, deputy director for the program executive office for spectrum, told reporters.