DOD's Mammoth JIE Effort Can Improve from Initial Shortfalls, CIOs Share

The Defense Department's continued collaboration to streamline the whole of the military's information technology networks and systems, known as the Joint Information Environment, tops leaders' agendas and fiscal spending plans—now available with a caveat for decision makers, officials said.

The next evolution of the JIE—a matrix of organizations that includes the services, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the office of the Deputy Chief Management Officer (DCMO), the Pentagon’s chief information officer (CIO), Cyber Command, the intelligence community, National Guard and military health care systems—now is in a position to pull from lessons learned, according to CIOs who shared service-strategic IT and cyber initiatives this week at an AFCEA DC Chapter monthly breakfast.

Such lessons include a miscued decision to buy so much hardware, offered Gary Wang, the Army’s deputy CIO. “It should have been bought as a service,” he said, adding that the effort's success just might be defined by organizations’ next steps that follow full implementation of the joint regional security stacks (JRSS). 

The JRSS is a suite of equipment tapped to become the department’s bulwark to ward off cyber attacks through firewall functions, intrusion detection and prevention, enterprise management, virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) and a host of network security capabilities. Wang suggested the effort transition into “buying it as a service” that should be led by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

“Watching us buy hardware, having it sit in a warehouse, the warranty run out … run it by the seat of our pants has been a hard thing to do,” Wang said.

The Marine Corps is keeping close tabs on the development as it prepares to fold into the JIE development, said Brig. Gen. Dennis Crall, USMC, director of command, control, communications and computers (C4) and CIO for the Marine Corps.

“Here is where the lessons learned are learnable and livable: where this could possibly go wrong … is if we spend too many resources and we lock ourselves down on a road that maybe is not as viable as we thought, and it limits our ability to go put the right kind of change in place,” Gen. Crall warned. “For us [a wrong choice] is more than an inconvenience. We’re going to war with what we build and have to build it right.”

The panelists addressed additional strategic IT and cyber initiatives, to include digital and network convergence, data center consolidation, data analytics and the big push for commercial cloud services.

“We’re looking more to use commercial services to get our jobs done and get back to the business of what we are supposed to be doing and let you all do the IT that we don't do very well,” quipped Janice Haith, the Navy’s deputy CIO.

The Navy’s massive Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES) program of robust and secure solutions to propel the service toward information dominance is ahead of schedule, Haith updated. The program could be implemented as early as 2020, instead of 2022. Additionally, the Navy is preparing for the much-anticipated recompete of its Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN), a multi-billion effort to provide network-centric data and services to Navy and Marine Corps personnel. “It’s going to be a total change for us and the way we do that business line,” Haith said. “We’ll be bringing in a lot more commercial capability.”

Attendees got a glimpse of the Coast Guard’s efforts for disruptive strategic initiatives, particularly since “we recognize that our organization is not perfectly aligned to this new world of everything moving fast,” joked Rear Adm. Marshall Lytle, USCG, assistant commandant for command, control, communications, computers and information technology (C4IT), and commander of the service’s Cyber Command. At issue is that the Coast Guard’s network resides as part of the Defense Department’s system while its budget and leadership belong to the Department of Homeland Security, a disconnect that at sometimes stalls progress.

Discussions of progress at the breakfast led to a question as to whether the Defense Department’s program to tap expertise of the forward-thinking businesses in Silicon Valley, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), has netted any tangible benefit for the military's cyber initiatives. The panelists—cautioned that news media was in attendance—offered lukewarm report cards. 

“We’re seeing some value from it, but we haven’t seen the full range at this point,” Haith reported. 

It’s a start, Wang surmised. “The potential is there. There’s a lot to be said for being in immersive environments, … but you have to consider how do you infect government service with that mindset. It’s not cost effective to cycle a whole bunch of government folks out there.

 “How do they facilitate things like more ‘petting zoos’ or ‘sandboxes’ for folks to kind of interact with?” Wang continued.