By Geoff Fein
The Joint Staff is working a number of challenges, from bringing together the services’ netcentric efforts under one umbrella, to developing data standards, all meant to ensure the ability to eventually operate in the Global Information Grid (GIG), according to an official with the Joint Staff.
What the Joint Staff has tried to do is come up with the overarching architecture that brings together ideas such as the Navy’s FORCEnet, the Army’s LandWarNet, the Air Force’s next generation command and control (C2) constellation and the Marine Corps Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTAF) C2, Vice Adm. Nancy Brown, director for command control, computers and communication (C4) systems on the Joint Staff (J6), told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“If we drive them to commons standards, policies, and processes, then we’ll have more of an enterprise and we’ll have a GIG, rather than a bunch of stove pipes that we try to kluge together when we meet up on the battlefield,” she added.
Brown noted it isn’t a matter of changing the services’ philosophy, but it is more getting the services to recognize that they may each have to adopt another service’s standards.
“There is still some parochialism out there. What we are trying to do…this GIG should be plug and play, so regardless of where I go and who paid for my desktop, I should be able to plug into the GIG, use the same login I use anywhere else, and have access to all of my information that I need to do the particular mission I am assigned to at that time,” she said.
And it should look and feel the same whether that soldier, sailor airman or Marine is at home station or deployed, Brown added.
Currently when a battalion at Fort Bragg, N.C., deploys to Iraq or Afghanistan they have all new passwords, all new user names, they have to go into a different environment that they build so they end up having to take all of their servers and information from Fort Bragg and with them, Brown said. “Instead of being able to reach back once they get there and have the same login as they did when they were at Fort Bragg and basically logging into the same network, because it’s global.
“That’s what we’re trying to do with our GIG 2.0 initiative. It really represents that end state. You have a single logon global access, and I really do have a global directory,” she said. “Today if I am on a Navy base I can go into what we call a global, but all I see are Navy addresses. We are trying to [provide] a global address book…directory…so wherever I am I can find whoever I need to talk to.”
One challenge that could stand in the way is the way the services acquire systems and technology.
“What we are trying to do is establish standards and common architectures,” Brown said.
That way, the device the service brings to the table shouldn’t make a difference.
“As long as we’ve agreed on data standards and we have open architecture and we’ve made things discoverable and understandable, the actual piece of software or hardware that I buy, as long as it meets those standards, shouldn’t make a difference,” she said.
One of the issues the Joint Staff is looking at now is how to ensure that what personnel in the field have is the latest and greatest technology available.
“What kind of architecture do we design for our data, because if we are going to store our data in common areas, so we will have shared processing facilities, how do I make sure that for the guy who has got limited bandwidth…works disconnected a lot of times…as soon as they plug in they are updated and they are not getting extraneous stuff, just the stuff they need to update them, and they have the bandwidth they need to reach back to wherever it is to get that,” Brown said. “How do you design your data storage so it supports all of those edge kind of requirements?”
The Joint Staff is working with the Defense Information Service Agency, Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Command and the Army Communications Electronic Command on those issues, Brown added. “All of those folks play a part in how we do that.”
While getting the services to work together may have its own set of challenges, bringing in coalition and international partners presents another, Brown added.
“That is going to be one of our challenges because we tend to move a lot faster, even though we don’t think we move very fast. [Coalition partners] tend to think we move pretty fast, and so we don’t want top lose them. We want to keep them with us,” she said. “Here again, if we can agree on common standards and policies, they should be able to plug and play just like we can plug and play.
“And if we can design our security architecture to recognize folks and give you access based on your identity and your role, we should be able to do that with our coalition partners,” Brown added. “That would allow them to have access to that information that they need, but not the information they don’t need and shouldn’t have access to.”