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joint warfighting concept can’t work without the acces- sibility and interoperability of expanded cloud services, said Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, CIO for the Joint Staff, at an April event hosted by C4ISRNet. In particular, the data sharing and artificial intelligence-powered analytics that are central to JADC2 require massive processing that often must happen near the tactical edge, and that is impossible without cloud technology, he added.
DOD’s $10 billion, 10-year Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud was intended to serve that purpose, but legal challenges that began even before the contract was awarded to Microsoft in 2019 have left JEDI in limbo.
e JADC2_slide.png image.
Regardless of whether JADC2’s enterprise cloud under- pinnings come from JEDI or elsewhere, Crall said DOD still needs to do significant work to take full advantage of that connectivity. “Just because you’ve established the environment doesn’t mean you have the sharing agree- ments and doesn’t necessarily mean you have the security apparatus in place to ensure the data is safe,” he added. “We’ve got a lot of homework to do outside of just the establishment of this.”
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, concurred. At a recent Brook- ings Institution event, he said the modernization needs of DOD’s command and control systems were central to discussions about the fiscal 2022 budget and the next National Defense Authorization Act.
“If you have a 500-ship navy and you’re up against some- one who has a five-ship navy but they’re able to shut down your information systems so none of your 500 ships work, they win,” Smith said.
He added that DOD’s command and control informa- tion systems must be durable, resilient and replaceable to avoid single points of failure. “We have to be able to protect those systems, and ideally, we have to be able to build a system so that we can make our adversary’s sys- tems more vulnerable,” Smith said. “That really needs to be the focus. Let’s just figure out what we need, buy it and make it work.”
MILCLOUD 2.0
NEW SERVICES MAKE IT EASIER TO MIGRATE TO MILCLOUD 2.0
The recent addition of VMware and AWS services improves the platform’s ease of use, security and cost-effectiveness
By Stephanie Kanowitz
The Defense Department’s milCloud 2.0 celebrated its third anniversary by adding offerings from VMware and Amazon Web Services to meet fit-for-purpose and general- purpose cloud needs.
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