By Ann Roosevelt
The Army wants soldiers to have universal access to the network no matter where they are and not have to learn new e-mails and battle command systems while trying to fight a war, the the Army Chief Information Officer said.
“It is a network we’re trying to build now, a continuous network from foxhole back to rear station,” Lt. Gen. Jeff Sorenson, CIO G-6, said at an Association of the United States Army ILW meeting last week.
“We have to fundamentally change what we’re talking about doing and how we do this for our soldiers,” he said.
In the coming months, the CIO and the Army acquisition chief are expected to sign an Acquisition Decision Memorandum that will lay out how the future battle command will function.
The service is working to develop a standard network architecture to provide the seamless connection for warfighters no matter where they are. Soldiers would no longer need a new e-mail or new CAC cards or learn a new battle command system as they rotate in and out of AORs. Not so long ago, Sorenson said, his Common Access Card (CAC) didn’t work in Qatar. “I’m not recognized in that AOR.”
In March, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey issued a memo on how the network should change over the next three years: “to a centralized, more secure operational and sustainable network to sustain an expeditionary Army in this era of persistent conflict,” Sorenson quoted. The network also needs to be interoperable and collaborative, not only with other services and other government entities, but with coalition partners and non-governmental organizations.
There is a base for battle command funding, in terms of what will be delivered, Sorenson said. “It’s growing. We have a [research and development] base that’s decreasing and a GWOT base that is essentially disappearing,” he said.
Therefore, there is a disconnect in how the service will afford this over time.
The service plans to accelerate current efforts, such as building Fixed Regional Hub Nodes. This fiscal year will see a request for proposals and contract award for two Fixed Regional Hub Nodes in the United States, one at Ft. Bragg, N.C., and one at Camp Roberts, Ga. Two such hubs already exist, in Germany and Kuwait.
Another effort is building Area Processing Centers (APC) to consolidate the multitude of centers that now exist.
“We intend to put out an RFP about the middle of January in terms of going out to a consolidation of APCs and how we get that data and those services, so it can be projected into the battlefield,” Sorenson said.
Improving network operations, the Army will build Network Service Centers in regions, to support each one of the combatant commands. “Not only will they support chosen combatant commands but they will interface into the joint world,” he said.
The Army is making “drastic improvements” in what it calls Network Enterprise Centers.
As the common architecture is developed, how systems are put together must be transformed, he said. More than 60 percent of what Sorenson works with is not a program of record activity, he said. Programs of record and non-programs of record have to be brought together and integrated into the standard architecture from the beginning, enabling a more streamlined and efficient process for integrating, training and sustaining the network.
“We’ve had a lot of success here in using commercial industry to build out this technology, but the downside has been we’ve got so much of it out there we can’t figure out how to make it all work together,” he said.
For industry, the Army will identify the architecture, and applications will be “spawned from a developer kit with common use parts,” he said. “You’re going to build [the application] in a framework such that it’s integrateable at the front end, so it’s not an issue at the back end.”
This year about $180 million is going to improve tool sets, Sorenson said. “We have a proliferation of tools, we’ve now standardized a series so that everyone sees the network the same way.”
The effort also will transform test and certification, he said.
The future includes cloud computing.
“That cloud becomes the commodity,” Sorenson said. “That cloud is what we’re going to provide to all of you and make sure it is standard and make sure that you understand it so that you can put your intellectual capital on building those applications.”
Industry will have access to the data to build applications for warfighters.
“That’s exactly the same business model as Apple uses today,” he said. Right now, today, it takes Apple [APPL] about two weeks to approve a third- party iPhone application, and move it through an automated test, certification and development process.
By contrast, he said, it took one reserve NCO in Iraq six months to receive approval from the Defense Information Systems Agency to access a server. The NCO built an application and hosted it on the web. People began to use it and “became so enamored with it, that by the time he left he had built 14 applications because everybody began to see the power of getting that data, having access to it, building the application and doing something different,” Sorenson said.
Accomplishing this is vital, Sorenson said. Adversaries don’t need to go to a CIO, get a certificate of networthiness or go through a rigorous test program. “He pulls out that iPhone, he builds an application, he’s using it against us yet we have not given our units or our soldiers the ability to do the same thing,” he said.