The Military’s Cloud Sees Almost $1 Billion in Task Orders

The U.S. Department of Defense’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), the multivendor, enterprise-wide commercial cloud services environment, is close to reaching $1 billion dollars of task order contracts issued, reported Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and commander of Joint Forces Headquarters-Department of Defense Information Network (JFHQ-DODIN), Fort Meade, Maryland.

Gen. Skinner spoke today at AFCEA International’s annual TechNet Augusta conference in Augusta, Georgia, held August 19-22.

The DoD stood up the JWCC in December 2022 to enable the military to contract for host and compute resources from commercial cloud service providers (CSPs). DISA’s J-9 Hosting and Compute center (J-9 HaC) manages the JWCC environment under guidance from DoD’s chief information officer (CIO).

“We're almost at the $1 billion mark of contracts let for commercial cloud capabilities,” Gen. Skinner explained. “We're like at $996 million and we have 20 more in the hopper.”

To advance cloud offerings for joint warfighters, officials structured the JWCC vehicle to be a one-enterprise contract and set up direct relationships with the CSPs, which is unique.

The J-9 HaC works with DoD customers to shape their cloud service requirements via task orders and interacts directly with the four private sector cloud companies on the contract—Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle—instead of a third party.

The $1 billion mark also represents activity from all of the military services—the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Space Force. “Every service and a lot of agencies have taken advantage of the JWCC already,” the DISA/JFHQ leader added.

In late June, before retiring from his civilian work as the Department of Defense CIO, John Sherman cited the JWCC as one of the efforts he was most proud to help accomplish. At that time, in an interview with SIGNAL Media, Sherman cited nearly $700 million in task orders from all different entities within DoD, the military services, combatant commands and field activities leveraging the cloud environment.

“That was a big pivot to move past JEDI [Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure] and move to JWCC,” Sherman said, speaking of the previously canceled one-vendor cloud contract. “I'm very proud of working with the team at DISA and Acquisition and Sustainment in Washington Headquarters Services and others to get the JWCC contract in place. That's one of the biggest things I'm proud of.”

However, it is only the beginning, with DISA and DoD already looking at the next phase of the JWCC. “And as we look forward to a JWCC 2.0, remember that JWCC is a three-year base with two one-year options, and we already need to be thinking ahead about what comes next,” Sherman said. “DISA is going to be looking at starting to formulate that later this year . . . that is what Gen. Skinner and the team are looking at.”

For Gen. Skinner—who will be retiring in a few months, with Maj. Gen. Paul T. Stanton, USA, coming into the two DISA and the JFHQ roles—the next phase of the JWCC will be to expand its offerings. 

“We just started sitting down and walking through ‘JWCC Next’ and what that would look like,” Gen. Skinner explained. "And I'll tell you from what I've seen from our team, it's really about how do we go faster.”

Already, the J-9 HaC is awarding contracts within weeks once a package is built based on the cloud services needed by the DoD customers, he said. Now, they are examining whether to compete every single task order or to develop other cloud vehicle methods.

“Is there an option where we can do an IDIQ [indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity] or something else that is not competed at the individual task order level,” he offered. “That is another option that we're looking at.”

In addition, JWCC officials are considering how to bring in other CSPs outside of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle who were awarded the first JWCC contract. “Are there other CSPs that can be part of the next contract to provide even more options and more potentially more capabilities,” Gen. Skinner asked.

The JWCC’s cloud offerings need to continue to expand to include emerging digital technologies such as user-friendly adoption interfaces, artificial intelligence tools or other cloud-based data capabilities.

The DISA/JFHQ leader cited the J-9 HaC’s Olympus offering as one example of the type of capabilities they would like to add in the future. “If you have minimal knowledge of how to take advantage of the cloud, Olympus is kind of like the ‘TurboTax’ of the cloud environment, where it enables you to very quickly bring up cloud capabilities for your application,” he said. “Are there add-ons to this that are more than just the standard cloud service provider capabilities? How do we bring artificial intelligence into the fold, for example, how do we bring other things in?”

In the meantime, DISA will continue ramping up its offerings through its on-premise cloud capability called Stratus and also needs industry help there.

“We also have on-prem capabilities,” Gen. Skinner said. “Stratus is our on-prem capability because at the end of the day, we're going to have hybrid capability no matter what. And by the way, even on-prem capability leverages technology from our commercial partners, which shows the relationships and the partnerships and how critical it is to what we are trying to do.”

Lydia Antonio-Vila contributed to this article.