Page 12 - FCW, November, December 2018

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November/December 2018 FCW.COM
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5% is the reduction President DonaldTrump is seeking in all agency budgets for fiscal 2020
Air Force wants to make Kessel Run standard in tech acquisition
Air Force officials plan to require that all the service’s technology deals mimic its agile software development model Kessel Run.
“You’re probably going to see maybe a directive from us that basically says every acquisition is going to have to have something that looks like Kessel Run from the primes,” Air Force CTO Frank Konieczny said at Dell’s Digital Transformation Summit in October. “So you want to have [authority to operate] within three or four weeks, not six years.”
The Air Force has been pushing for broad organizational change when it comes to adopting new technology, as evidenced by the newly launched Program Executive Office-Digital to handle agile software development.
The shift in focus has generated attention in Congress. During a
Senate hearing in September, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked Defense Department Principal Deputy CIO Essye Miller how officials could replicate Kessel Run’s in-house coding units throughout DOD to improve cyber operations.
“Getting the Kessel Run lab up and running was not easy,” Warren said. “How can we normalize and scale these types [of] programs up and make technical skills like coding or cyber defense a core competency for active- duty personnel and defense civilians?”
Miller said cybersecurity was one of the top skill sets DOD is seeking to recruit. But Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Dennis Crall, DOD’s principal deputy cyber advisor, said a lack of tools and standardization created barriers.
“We spend a lot of time and frustration in the department trying to
make disparate software applications communicate with each other,” Crall said. Young workers are “screaming for ways to contribute, and we are taking that on board and showing great promise, but there’s a lot of work ahead.”
At the Dell event, Konieczny said the human element has an impact on the long-term success of agile software development. The Air Force is considering bringing back programming as a career field, though that is just one part of the solution, he added.
“You’re going to have some turnover all the time, so the code has to be [written] in such a way that you can pick it up and utilize it, putting some standardization across the code,” he said.
— Lauren C. Williams
lamented that “to date, [the U.S. has] not had any kind of national coordinated strategy” to match what other countries have. Since 2014, for example, China has surged past the United States in the number of patents related to quantum applications, he added.
Although Monroe said he believes the threat of Chinese dominance is overstated, that doesn’t mean the U.S. can afford to neglect significant investment in quantum research and technologies.
Congress is beginning to take an interest. The House passed the National Quantum Initiative Act in September, which directs the White House to implement a 10-year plan to accelerate quantum computing development.
Experts say U.S. risks falling behind on quantum computing
The promise — and threat — of quantum computing is still years away. But experts fear that a lack of government emphasis and coordination on research strategy could upend U.S. digital and national security.
“Global computing leadership is essentially up for grabs again,” said Stephen Ezell, vice president of global innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, at an event in September. “It’s going to be the societies that marshal the optimal set of resources in terms of funding, talent, university research and commercialization that lead this transition.”
Quantum computing replaces the zeros and ones of conventional computing with multivariable quantum
bits, radically increasing the speed of calculations and threatening to make current computing and cryptography obsolete.
Christopher Monroe, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, cited the capabilities of quantum computing in terms of hacking, breaking encryption codes at lightning-fast speeds and storing immense amounts of data but added, “This problem is really far away.”
“I would make a prediction that it’s way more than five years before we can break public-key encryptions,” he said. “I am afraid, though, if we don’t find something in five or 10 years, we will never get to the billions of cubits you need to break codes and so forth.”
As far as the government’s role, Ezell
— Chase Gunter