Then last year, leaders evacuated Travis Air Force Base in northern California due to nearby raging wildfires.

And today, Arctic Air Force bases hosting radar early warning systems and communication equipment are suffering coastal erosion, which is damaging seawalls, runways and infrastructure. Thawing permafrost and erosion threatens bases in the Arctic, damaging infrastructure. NASA tracks the extent of Arctic sea ice and estimates a declining 13.1 percent rate of change per decade.

“Climate change is going to cost us in resources and readiness,” Joe Bryan, senior climate adviser at the Pentagon, said during a July webinar. “The reality is that it already is.”

Now, after years of the Trump administration sidestepping the issue, the Biden administration has asked for $617 million in fiscal 2022 for climate change preparation, adaptation and mitigation. In addition, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, having already identified climate change as a top priority, launched a Climate Working Group in response to a January executive order signed by President Joe Biden. Climate change is no longer a problem for future defense leaders; it is an immediate challenge.

According to NASA, climate change is driven by increased levels of greenhouse gases causing global temperatures to rise, the ocean to warm, polar ice to melt and sea levels to rise. Since the late 1800s, Earth’s average surface temperature has risen 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit, and the last seven years have been the warmest. The year 2020 is tied with 2016 for the warmest year on record.

Biden warned in his executive order that the world is facing “a profound climate crisis. We have a narrow moment to pursue action at home and abroad in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of that crisis and to seize the opportunity that tackling climate change presents.”

The problem is becoming clearer. The Congressional Research Service found that the Department of Defense manages more than 1,700 global military installations on coastlines that could prove vulnerable to rises in sea level. A 2019 departmental survey involving 79 installations warned that about two-thirds are vulnerable to recurrent flooding and that another half are under threat by drought or wildfires.

Melting Arctic ice opens new avenues to potential conflict; sea level rise threatens hundreds of millions of people globally and impacts military installations; and extreme heat can influence training and operations.

With the White House and the Pentagon signaling the prioritization of climate measures, Defense News reached out to the Army, Air Force and Navy about their efforts to adapt.

Innovation at the Air and Space forces

Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Virginia — home to Air Combat Command and host to critical fighter aircraft as well as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities — sits just 8 feet above sea level.

Diego Garcia — an atoll in the Indian Ocean that often hosts deployments of U.S. bombers and is central to operations in Afghanistan, South Asia and East Africa — sits only 6.5 feet above sea level. And the Marshall Islands — where the Space Force is building a $1 billion radar installation to track satellites and space junk, known as the Space Fence — sits just 10 feet higher than the ocean.

“Nearly all of our installations are exposed to some natural or climate-related threat such as hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, and extreme winter weather,” Air Force spokeswoman Sarah Fiocco told Defense News. “These climate considerations have a direct impact on our ability to launch our missions, as our installations are a platform from which we project air power.

“The Department of the Air Force is actively working toward making our installations more resilient to the potential impacts of climate change and extreme weather.”

For example, Fiocco said, construction projects deliberately located in flood plains for mission purposes are built 3 feet above the design flood elevation (or the highest point of a possible flood that a retrofitting method is designed to protect against).

Amid ongoing disaster recovery at Tyndall Air Force Base, the service is constructing new buildings 19 feet above sea level if they are near the Gulf of Mexico. Fiocco said the projects at Tyndall are also built to withstand a minimum of 165 mph.

“Due to integrating severe weather and climate change design into our DoD building code, every project accounts for future changes in the climate and possibility of increased severe weather events,” she said.

The changing climate, particularly underway in the Arctic, also creates new mission challenges for the U.S. military. For example, a 2020 report from the think tank Rand said the melting Arctic ice and Russian military activity in the area means the U.S. Air Force must prepare for “an increase in demand for intercept flights” in the region.

“That’s a sensing challenge [because] we need to know what’s coming over the poles, which can be difficult,” said Raphael Cohen, acting director of strategy and doctrine program at Rand’s Project Air Force. “It’s a communications challenge because the way communications work in the high north are somewhat different. And then there’s a military capability question too. How much … resources you put up there? That is also a thing that we have to consider.”

Fiocco told Defense News that the service recognizes climate change “may drive increased mission demands or contingencies in new regions (e.g., Arctic) in response to resource competition, geopolitical instability, and a growing need for humanitarian assistance and disaster response to recover from climate-related events.”

“The Department of the Air Force is reviewing its current posture to inform necessary pivots in operational planning, locations and activities based on climate change considerations,” she added.

That includes projects with the Air Force Research Laboratory dedicated to improving communication capabilities in the high north. Arron Layns, the lab’s Arctic portfolio manager, said the organization is specifically working on new satellite and laser communications, and on bolstering high-frequency communications in the region.

Space-based communication for the Arctic is particularly challenging, as forecasting capabilities beyond Earth’s atmosphere are still maturing, and the North Pole’s environment is especially “dynamic,” Layns said. That’s in part due to the aurora — or northern lights — and how it interferes with satellite communications.

“The space environment is woefully under-observed, and the models are coming up, but they’re just not quite there for what we need,” Layns said. “The space environment has huge impacts on a variety of things. And if you don’t get that environmental information right, you might not know how your satellite’s going to work, or you might not know how your communications or [if] your navigation is really going to work properly.”

The Air Force, which is itself a major contributor to climate change, is looking at novel ways to improve the combat capability of its fleet while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. According to Fiocco, the service wants to increase the fuel economy of its legacy aircraft, in particular its mobility fleet.

In congressional testimony in July, Jennifer Miller, the acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment and energy, said the service is funding “small items” that can increase efficiency, such as modifying aircraft with little winglets or adjusting the angle of windshield wipers.

Additionally, the planning tool JIGSAW, developed by the Air Force software factory Kessel Run and the Defense Innovation Unit — the Pentagon’s liaison for nontraditional contractors — now saves the service 180,000 gallons of fuel per week.

The Air Force is also exploring advancements in airframes and engines that would be “significantly more efficient” and increase combat power. According to Fiocco, the service is eyeing third-stream engines, which would be 25 percent more efficient than engines currently in use, as well as blended wing body aircraft, which would be about 30 percent more efficient.

However, she said, the potential for those capabilities is “limited by both technology and budgetary issues.”

Army strategies

The Army is currently writing its own climate change strategy, which is scheduled for release this fall, according to Jack Surash, the senior official performing the duties of assistant secretary of the Army for installations, environment and energy. Following the release, the service will unveil a “very detailed” climate change action plan that outlines a broad, “multiyear effort” for how the Army will tackle climate issues, he told lawmakers in July.

Asked by Defense News how the Army plans to adapt to potentially harsher environmental conditions, the service’s answers largely focused on energy storage.

“The Army is examining improved energy density and reliability of energy supply and storage technologies, [artificial intelligence]-enabled system-level power distribution (microgrids) and the use of renewable energy sources for use in operational contexts, including forward operating bases, tactical vehicles and on the battlefield,” Surash said in a statement.

He added that the Army wants “increased battery capacity, auxiliary power, electrification and alternative fuel sources that will increase operational endurance within the force, while reducing carbon emissions.”

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, also emphasized the military’s need to generate power on the battlefield in challenging environments.

“Coming up with new ways to generate power is going to be essential. Not just because of the ‘feel good, we need to be more clear’ military perspective to combat climate change, [but] because the military is going to operate in places where the host nation may have made those choices already and therefore they don’t have a bunch of electric power available for us to use,” he said.

The service is also exploring hybrid and fully electric vehicles, though top Army leaders said this year that hybrid vehicles are more likely to be a successful option in the near term. In congressional testimony, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said the service is considering hybrid vehicles that reduce fuel consumption by 25 percent. Meanwhile, Bruce Geil, chief of the power integration architecture branch at the Army Research Laboratory, said his portfolio is focused on making hybrid power systems more capable, but also smaller.

The lab also has several ongoing efforts related to climate prediction and planning that help commanders map out operations.

“If you have a climatological sense of what’s going to be in that area, then commanders can plan for those regions and know what weapon systems are going to work,” said Robb Randall, chief of the lab’s Atmospheric Science Center and the Atmospheric Dynamics and Analytics Branch. “How do I outfit my personnel and supply your need? How much water do I need to bring?”

The lab is also working on risk-assessment and decision-aid technology for desertification, in which fertile land becomes desert, to predict areas that are more prone to the change in the long term, Randall said. It’s also developing predictive capabilities for flash droughts — a rapid onset of drought — which can cause regional instability.

In a 2019 report to Congress, the Army listed desertification as the top climate threat to nine of its top 10 most vulnerable stateside bases. The service listed drought as the secondary threat to all 10. The same year, the Army War College released a report naming challenges the service will face due to climate change, including rising temperatures and an increased need for water. The report warned that the service is “precipitously close to mission failure concerning hydration of the force in a contested arid environment.”

In addition, the Army Research Lab and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency each have ongoing projects tackling hydration. The lab is exploring how to decontaminate polluted water using an aluminum panel that concentrates solar energy for purification. DARPA has chosen six partners to find unique ways to extract potable water from the atmosphere.

The Army Corps of Engineers is also contributing to departmentwide efforts, having designed the DoD Climate Assessment Tool, which projects the effects of climate change on almost 1,400 DoD locations. Additionally, the corps is researching unique approaches to developing construction materials to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Navy preps for new missions

A Pentagon report this year on the impact of environmental changes to installations found the Navy had a “greater range of climate exposure” than the other services, with it facing drought, heat and coastal flooding in the United States as well as East Asia and the Middle East.

The Navy did not answer questions from Defense News by press time about how it is adapting to the changing environment.

In congressional testimony in July, Todd Schafer, acting assistant secretary of the Navy for energy, installations and environment, stated broadly that the service is working to “build climate resiliency” into its installations.

Sea level rise particularly threatens naval bases. The Hampton Roads, Virginia, area, home to the largest concentration of military infrastructure in the world, is already under threat of flooding, with the sea level near the area expected to rise 1.5 feet in the next 20-50 years, according to the Congressional Research Service. The worst effects are expected at the end of this century.

John Conger, former acting assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment, told Defense News that in areas like Hampton Roads, the emphasis must be on protecting investments rather than taking the costly step of moving them.

“What the smart play is, in the near term, is to make your infrastructure more resilient,” said Conger, who leads the Center for Climate and Security and serves as a senior U.S. adviser to the International Military Council on Climate and Security.

DARPA is exploring new solutions to mitigate the effects of a rising sea level and the subsequent flooding. The agency’s Reefense program is looking to use reef-mimicking ecosystems to reduce the impact.

Lori Adornato, the Reefense program manager, said the Army Corps of Engineers is interested in the project. “Because we have a number of bases on the coast, one of the ways that we can think about protecting them is taking advantage of how nature has protected coasts over time.”

The Navy will also need to adapt to new missions, as fresh sea routes spring up amid the melting of Arctic ice — pathways for which U.S. adversaries Russia and China might take advantage.

The service will also need to improve its weather forecasting capabilities. That effort is underway with the Office of Naval Research, which is collecting data in the Arctic about waves, sea ice, and atmospheric and water circulation.

But there’s a lack of data.

“We don’t have the pattern of operations in the Arctic to have built the type of expertise that the Navy has, in terms of conducting things like detailed weather forecasting” in other regions, said Joshua Tallis, research scientist at Virginia-based think tank CNA.

To operate more frequently in the Arctic, the Navy may need ice-hardened ships — an expensive capability. In Senate testimony in July, Vice Adm. Jim Kilby, deputy chief of naval operations for war-fighting requirements and capabilities, said the service would make future ship design decisions based on where “we think we are going to operate.”

Tallis noted that the investment in ice-hardened ships is a tough choice for an armed service that operates globally.

“Part of what the Navy has to think about as it is building the force that combatant commanders will use in the future: It is this question of, is that demand for a specialized, ice-hardened capability sufficient in order to warrant the expense for the relatively niche capability that they would purchase? And so far, at least from a Navy standpoint, the cost benefit hasn’t worked in that favor.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed, who serves as a key gatekeeper for Pentagon nominees and policy, told Defense News that the job of undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment ― which involves the tricky balance of affordability, modernization and cohesion between systems ― is “a critical job.”

“You have to find the best possible candidate, not simply just filling the job,” said Reed, D-R.I. “Then that candidate has to be vetted, and it takes a while. So there’s a process of very, very rapidly identifying a top-notch candidate and then as fast as possible getting him vetted.

“That’s a key position, and without that position being filled you’re going to require a lot of people to have multiple duties and not just one responsibility.”

In another setback for the Pentagon, the official performing the duties of the job Brown was to take, Stacy Cummings, is expected to depart in the coming weeks, Politico reported Friday.

Pentagon spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell confirmed the report for Defense News, said the department had succession plans in place and that its acquisition work would go unhindered by Brown’s withdrawal. “The department’s work on acquisitions and focus on mission continues, guided by the expertise of the professionals in Acquisition and Sustainment,” she said in a statement.

Between the White House vetting a new nominee and the Senate’s crowded schedule, announcing and confirming a new candidate before Congress leaves town for its August recess could be a heavy lift. Reed’s panel will be occupied next week with its markup of the annual defense policy bill, but he said he could try to advance the nominee before August if the administration produces one that soon.

Brown said he withdrew from the running on July 13 because an ongoing investigation into allegations against him were expected to take up to a year to be resolved. The DoD inspector general is probing allegations that Brown violated federal hiring practices while serving as director of the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley outreach arm ― allegations he denies.

“Due to lengthy delays in proceeding with his nomination, Michael Brown has chosen to ask the President to withdraw his nomination to the Department of Defense,” White House deputy press secretary Chris Meagher told Defense News in a statement. “We agree that this is the best course and will be immediately moving to fill this critical role.”

The likely delay in filling the job comes at an inopportune time for President Joe Biden, who focused his Pentagon budget proposal on divesting legacy weapons systems in favor of research and development.

Reed is not the only one who wants the White House to move fast. “I hope they have somebody that they send over quickly. I know Mike, he’s very talented,” said Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, who chairs the SASC Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support. “I was very discouraged when I heard that, and I hope they will send us somebody top-notch very fast.”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has only one nominee offered for its acquisitions arm: Deborah Rosenblum, who was tapped for assistant secretary for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs. Vacant positions include the deputy undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, the assistant secretary for sustainment, the assistant secretary for acquisition, and the assistant secretary for industrial base policy.

Arnold Punaro, a former SASC staff director and the current board chair of the National Defense Industrial Association, suggested the administration could fast-track the process by redirecting another nominee or offering a one who has already been through the confirmation process. However, Punaro and other observers agree there is no obvious replacement for Brown as yet.

There were high hopes for Brown’s ability to reform the Defense Department’s purchasing practices to prioritize nontraditional companies offering innovative solutions, an area considered key in winning the military technology race with China. A tech sector veteran, Brown spent nearly three years as director of the Defense Innovation Unit, where he focused on connecting small, innovative companies with departmental components.

Experts say it will be a challenge for the White House to find a nominee like Brown. He had a unique understanding of government acquisition and the needs of cash-strapped startups offering transformational technologies, and how that translates to the department’s competition with China.

“There are so few people that get this,” said Bill Greenwalt, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy. “There are so few people who have an understanding of the ability of Silicon Valley and small business innovation to radically change the Department of Defense. And Mike Brown was one of them.”

Former Rep. Mac Thornberry, who led acquisition reform efforts in Congress for years as House Armed Services Committee chair, felt much the same way.

“I think it’s a loss, really, for the country because of his background in industry, his knowledge of finance: what it takes for private companies to come up with financing, the investment to do business with the government,” Thornberry said. “I just thought that was a home run, and now it’s not.”

The next undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment will be charged with quickly developing cutting-edge systems and turning them into formal programs, especially if the Pentagon plans to retire legacy systems. It’s an area where the Pentagon has historically lagged, and it happens to be the specialty of the Defense Innovation Unit.

Thornberry said that, generally, the lack of confirmed nominees undermines the Biden administration’s goals of making tough and contentious decisions on the Pentagon’s investments.

“Any acting person in any capacity is going to be hesitant to make big decisions,” Thornberry said. “It will be hard to impossible to make significant decisions with the number of acting folks that they have.”

In a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin obtained by Defense News, Brown said he was withdrawing because an inspector general investigation into hiring practices at DIU was expected to delay consideration of his nomination by up to a year.

”While I am confident the Office of the Inspector General will ultimately find no wrongdoing on my part, I know there are other qualified candidates who can focus on the urgent business of making our acquisition process faster and more cost-effective,” Brown said in the letter. “I must put the interests of the Department above my own enthusiasm for serving as Under Secretary for Acquisitions and Sustainment.”

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Austin respects Brown’s decision and thanked him “for his willingness to be nominated for this challenging position.” Austin “remains grateful for Mr. Brown’s continued service at the Defense Innovation Unit,” Kirby said.

News of Brown’s withdrawal was first reported by Inside Defense.

Numerous defense innovation experts expressed dismay over Brown pulling out as nominee. Because of his past career in the tech sector and work at DIU, many had high hopes for Brown’s ability to reform the department’s arcane acquisition practices that doesn’t suit small innovative, nontraditional contractors offering new technologies that primes don’t.

Chris Brose, former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director, said Brown had a “proven track record of rapid acquisition and fielding of advanced technologies” and called his withdrawal a huge setback.

“You need someone who understands what that ecosystem looks like, that understands what the cutting edge of advanced technology is and who’s developing it, what nontraditional defense companies and new entrants are going through in trying to begin and scale their work with the Department of Defense,” said Brose, now chief strategy officer at defense tech firm Anduril Industries. “He, better than anybody, understands all of that.”

As undersecretary of defense for acquisitions and sustainment, Brown would have overseen a budget of more than $100 billion for major defense programs — such as the F-35 fighter jet, aircraft carrier elevator and efforts to speed up software acquisitions. He would have been highly influential over defense industry matters and been responsible for maintaining America’s military edge.

Brown has led the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley outreach arm since 2018 and worked to connect small startups developing innovative technologies with Department of Defense components. Brown’s initial nomination was praised by observers, including several former senior DoD officials, because of his tech industry background and understanding of the challenges nontraditional contractors face working with the DoD.

“One of the exciting aspects of his nomination was the combination of a few different skill sets and knowledge bases that he would have brought to the role,” said Lindsey Sheppard, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Brown’s withdrawal is another setback for the president’s efforts to fill key roles at the Pentagon.

“Whenever you don’t have confirmed leadership in senior positions at the Department of Defense, you’re losing,” Brose said. “You don’t have people with the mandate and the legitimacy to take decisions and risky decisions to the fullest extent of the authorities of that office.”

Brown joined government in 2016 as a White House presidential innovation fellow after a long career in the tech sector capped by two years as CEO of cybersecurity software giant Symantec. As a fellow, he wrote a detailed report on the threat the Chinese government posed to the U.S. venture capital system.

Under Brown’s guidance, DIU has transitioned increasing amounts of projects to DoD components. In 2020, DIU transitioned 11 projects, up from four in 2018. One of DIU’s most significant achievements under Brown’s leadership was providing an alternative to Chinese-made small drones under a DIU project called Blue sUAS, which made trusted small drone options available to the whole federal government.

Bill Greenwalt, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy, called the news “sad and depressing.”

“He had the potential, based on his background, to really bring in and leverage this massively innovative sector of the U.S. and international economy and then fold that into how we can create better capability against China,” Greenwalt said.

Arnold Punaro, a former staff director with the Senate Armed Services Committee and the National Defense Industrial Association board chairman, said he is disappointed to see Brown out of the running.

“The DOD acquisition system needs strong leadership to implement innovation, speed, and cost-effectiveness, and Mike was the perfect choice for the position,” Punaro said in a statement. “Mike’s strong leadership will continue to benefit DIU and the Department moving forward, and we are lucky to have him there.”

Components across the Defense Department are trying to lock in emerging capabilities, such as artificial intelligence and new communications technology, that will define the coming decades of war, while divesting legacy tools used in the last 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We have to maintain the budget and resources to continue moving forward,” Gen. Richard Clarke, commander of Special Operations Command, said in a keynote at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Special Operations Forces Industry Conference. Where “we can’t stay is: USSOCOM only does counterterrorism, only does crisis response. We have to develop and make sure we really look at what SOF [special operations forces] can do in competition and what SOF can do in high-end conflict.”

The Pentagon envisions the future battlefield as an interconnected web of sensors that pass data to war fighters, combined with a myriad of emerging technologies including AI/machine learning, mesh networks, advanced waveforms and secure digital tools that allow commanders to make decisions faster.

SOCOM is trying to fill many gaps related that future battlefield, including how to effectively search through its “mountains” of data, move that information across levels of security classifications and communicate across a more complex battle space, Clarke said. Operators will also face threats from adversaries’ unmanned systems, electronic warfare, cyber effects and information warfare, he noted.

“What we must be able to go is not just play defense, but we also have to play offense for our capabilities, our war fighters,” Clarke said. “To meet those challenges we have to innovate to transform our force. Investing in both people and key technologies are going to be essential.”

SOCOM is trying to do so through its science and technology arm’s Hyper-Enabled Operator effort, which aims to outfit operators with access to informative data in austere environments to improve decision-making, giving them a so-called cognitive advantage. In fiscal 2020, the Hyper-Enabled Operator project had a $16 million budget, according to a presentation at the event from Lisa Sanders, SOCOM director of science and technology.

That project has transitioned some technologies to acquisition program offices. According to Sanders, that effort needs advanced data analytics on the battlefield, voice-to-voice language translation, and beyond-line-of-sight communications with high bandwidth if satellite communication is unavailable.

Sanders said that one beyond-line-of-sight communications project transitioned to SOCOM’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications and Computers, while an integrated situational awareness tool moved over to PEO Special Reconnaissance to support a program of record.

She also said the program has a “big focus” on edge computing, or the ability to process data on the battlefield without sending it thousands of miles back to a data center, as well as natural language processing, which would allow computers and humans communicate better.

SOCOM’s Network and Data Management Capability Focus Area is looking for secure artificial intelligence capabilities, Sanders said, specifically focused on trust between machine-to-machine connections.

“Any sort of fused environment, being able to know that that information is secure, is important,” Sanders said. “Data integrity is important for us. So those are areas that we’re seeking additional work.”

The S&T director also said SOCOM has shortfalls in nonkinetic effects, such as information operations, electronic warfare and cyber, adding “we’re looking for projects coming to us that have those kinds of capabilities.” According to the presentation from Sanders, the Next-Generation Effects CFA wants to more than double its Next-Generation Effect Budget to $35 million in fiscal 2022.

The command’s Next Generation Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance focus area will center in on improving situational awareness. Sanders said a significant part of that involves space and what Special Operations-specific payloads the command needs to maintain situational awareness.

“Our gaps are really about how do I take the capability that I’ve learned to expect in the last 20 years of war and make them tactical, and make them not require you to go back to the to the analyst and not have an army of analysts to determine what’s coming off of one set of [data] feeds,” Sanders said.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy has transferred authorities over networks and IT systems to a newly created office dedicated to Project Overmatch, the service’s plan for a connected force for future battles, C4ISRNET has learned.

The Navy shifted several network and IT-related technical authorities held by Naval Sea Systems Command, Naval Air Systems Command and Naval Information Warfare Systems Command to the direct report program manager for Project Overmatch, according to a memo C4ISRNET obtained.

“As a DRPM, effective immediately, Project Overmatch has all program authorities for Research and Development, Acquisition and Sustainment programs related to warfighting networks, including the networking needs for unmanned systems and long range fires,” stated the memo dated Feb. 23. “In addition, the DRPM is responsible for developing a unified approach to the data, infrastructure and tools and analytics needed at the operational and tactical levels to execute DMO [distributed maritime operations] as envisioned.”

Under that vision for potential conflicts with advanced adversaries, the Navy’s ships could be dispersed across a wide area but connected by a secure network.

Project Overmatch is the Navy’s effort to enable that all-connected force for the Pentagon’s priority plan of Joint All-Domain Command and Control, in which sensors and shooters are linked across domains. Rear Adm. Douglas Small, who leads the project, was named the direct report program manager in an October memo, and he reports to the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.

The move will give Small authority over the “applicable” war-fighting networks, technical architectures and standards, and will “expand authorities to include data management designs and standards for platform integration and data interoperability.”

The memo is signed by Frederick Stefany, acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, and Adm. William Lescher, vice chief of naval operations.

“The memo signed by Mr. Stefany and ADM Lescher is the next step in codifying CNO’s October 2020 memo.  This recent memo enables the transfer of requisite authorities to RADM Small so he can effectively and efficiently execute the CNO’s directives,” said Lt. Courtney Callaghan, spokesperson for the Navy. “Critical to Project Overmatch is the development of networks, infrastructure, data architecture, tools and analytics that support the operational and developmental environment that will enable sustained maritime dominance using manned and unmanned systems.”

The Project Overmatch DRPM will also be tasked with developing a unified approach to the data, infrastructure, tools and analytics “needed at the operational and tactical levels to execute DMO as envisioned.”

The DRPM will also include a senior executive service deputy director position that will focus on Overmatch and staffing needs, working with leaders inside the Navy’s Digital Integration Support Cell and necessary program integration offices “to ensure a ‘whole of Navy’ enterprise team across Program Executive Offices (PEO) and System Commands (SYSCOM).”

Additionally, all science and technology efforts related to war-fighting networks and advanced data architectures and analytics will fall under the DRPM, according to the memo.

The Navy’s move to consolidate Overmatch responsibilities underneath one office is important as the military services look to break down stovepipes to move toward Joint All-Domain Command and Control. The Army and Air Force have similar projects, Project Convergence and Advanced Battle Management System, respectively.

Meanwhile, the Army shared details with C4ISRNET Tuesday about a successful lab demonstration of a data exchange with the Air Force, mirroring the type of cross-communication needed to achieve the Pentagon’s goal to connect targeting information from any source to the best shooter from any service, an effort known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control. The Army allowed C4ISRNET to tour the facility’s C5ISR Center experimental environments, set to become a central hub in integrating systems across services.

“This is probably the first time that I have seen a level of cooperation and commitment to an outcome,” Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Dennis Crall, the CIO/J-6 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told C4ISRNET in an interview at Aberdeen. “So in addition, this is simply the moving of these ideas, which I think are pretty novel, and moving them to a plan, where we have mission threads, places to start, and a genuine desire to challenge authorities, resources and processes if they don’t fit the rapid nature, and the type and scope of work that we need to do to get this outcome.”

With the Joint Chiefs leading the project, Crall has been vocal in calling for cooperation on JADC2, stating that old data governance models will not be successful as the services look to connect their networks. In future battles against technologically advanced adversaries, the services must rapidly exchange information to enable commanders to make quick decisions, such as putting fires on target.

Crall called the meeting, as reported by Breaking Defense, to work toward agreement on common data management practices to ease the services’ ability to share information, moving away from JADC2 efforts that have largely been “anything goes,” which he called unsustainable.

One step accomplished at the meeting was agreeing on a definition of a common data fabric, a task that Crall said seems “simple, but it’s complex.” The people in the meeting who worked out that definition included officials from the Joint Chiefs, Pentagon chief data officer office, Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Information Systems Agency, combatant commands, Department of Homeland Security, and NATO.

Here’s the wording they settled on: The data fabric is “a DoD federated data environment for sharing information through interfaces and services, to discover, understand and exchange data with partners across all domains, echelons and security levels.”

In order to make JADC2 a reality, the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System, the Army’s Project Convergence and the Navy’s Project Overmatch must be able to transfer data to each other, a task made impossible if the systems can’t read or translate the data into formats that a system understands. While the services go about their own concepts, Crall recognizes that “one size does not fit all” but said that they need to be ready to come together sooner than later.

“Today was really about setting that baseline of common level understanding and vernacular, particularly as it relates to all the way down to these mission threads and across the joint force,” Brig. Gen. Rob Parker, the J-6 deputy director for Joint All-Domain Command and Control on the Joint Staff, told C4ISRNET, adding that the Defense Innovation Board would review the definition before it is finalized.

Stuart Whitehead, the J-6 deputy director for cyber and command, control, communications and computers integration on the Joint Staff, said the stakeholders identified components of the data fabric definition that they will turn into objectives to direct subsequent work on JADC2.

These components, according to the agenda viewed by C4ISRNET, are metadata tagging, common data interfaces, data access control, data security and data infrastructure. The agenda also said the overall lead for the common data fabric will be the Pentagon’s chief data officer, Dave Spirk.

“It’s given us … a foundation, but it’s also given us a springboard for what we’re going to work next,” Whitehead said.

To enable that, the Joint Staff is working on joint war-fighting requirement documents, a strategy to build JADC2 and define common language for the services. The challenge the Pentagon faces is that the services fight in their unique domains, meaning they have their own needs.

“There comes a point in time where if there’s really no benefit, and only risk and expense as a result of those differences, then we’ve got to collapse those sooner rather than later,” Crall said.

Whitehead pointed out that one of the biggest challenges to sharing data is the fact that requirements have changed so much over time.

“We’re now talking about linking programs between multiple services in order to get a collective capability, [and] that is probably a situation that wasn’t anticipated when a particular requirement was created, say 10 or 15 years ago,” Whitehead said.

Parker noted that the stakeholders discussed reciprocity of systems, or accepting mature, rigorously tested solutions developed by other services.

“We need to get out of our own way sometimes to bring those types of things, and faster, to really bring about that interoperability,” Parker said.

The Air Force and Army have actively worked on plugging their capabilities together after formal staff talks last September between the services led to an agreement to share data and develop common sharing standards.

Describing the experimental data use case, Portia Crowe, the chief data officer of the Army’s Network Cross-Functional Team, told C4ISRNET that the Air Force’s DataONE environment is sharing data with the Army’s common data fabric, known as Rainmaker, which can then transfer that data into the Army’s Command Post Computing Environment. The Army used an application programming interface to overcome the fact that the Army and Air Force don’t use the same data message format.

The Army’s work on a common data fabric, she noted, could be a key piece of joint war fighting.

“We have a common data fabric that allows us to do a lot of that that we couldn’t do before,” Crowe said. “So instead of system to system, we can do one system to many. We can do one data library to many. I mean, the possibilities are enormous now.”

As work on JADC2 moves forward, Crall said that he expects “no less” than three follow-up meetings that will become “increasingly more challenging by design,” with the next session proposed for mid-April.

That day, COVID-19 cases in the U.S. had soared 40 percent in 24 hours, and the California governor issued the nation’s first stay-at-home order for residents. A few days earlier, the Department of Defense began sending employees home.

To prepare for the impending national emergency, the small IT staff sprinted to enable more than 1 million employees to work remotely at once, up from 95,000 on an average day before the pandemic.

The race to set up telework for the largest employer in the U.S. — and likely the world — included increasing circuits, upgrading infrastructure, expanding virtual private networks and drastically boosting bandwidth. But the department needed a collaboration platform so employees’ work could continue uninterrupted.

The scramble led to the Commercial Virtual Remote Environment, or CVR, a platform with Microsoft Teams collaboration tools and other Office 365 products that gave employees new telework tools such as chat, video conferencing and document sharing.

In a matter of weeks, the DoD seemed to overcome all of its perennial IT challenges at once: speed, scaling and training. With CVR, the department quickly and incrementally deployed a new IT tool to meet the needs of disparate components across the globe.

The accelerated timeline was unprecedented, cutting the many months or even years often needed to adopt software to one month.

“I would argue that if we had brought in Teams and had done the normal research, testing, socialization, pilot rollouts … [it would’ve taken] the better part of a year,” DoD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said.

Officials shared in-depth details for the first time with C4ISRNET about what it took to roll out CVR, which boasts about 1.3 million users.

The story is one of a department overcoming typical IT contracting barriers to fast-track software development processes on a grandiose scale. DoD senior leaders and program managers who have pushed for quicker adoption herald the project as the ultimate example of the flexibility and speed capable at the department.

To hear Cloud Computing Program Office Director Sharon Woods tell it, people gave up full nights of sleep to deploy the software. Naps came intermittently throughout the day. Showers? Rare. Baseball caps covered unwashed hair. Coffee was king.

“Looking back on it, it’s almost a little surreal,” she said.

Inside the rollout

In early March, a telework task force created by Deasy’s office recognized in its daily meetings that the department needed to prepare in case the coronavirus spread widely. The issue was so important that the group included a who’s who collection of Pentagon IT leaders: all service chief information officers; senior staff from Deasy’s office; and representatives from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Cyber Command, the National Security Agency and the Defense Information Systems Agency.

“A big part of that was, what does that mean in terms of the requirements for the workforce, if and when they need to telework in unprecedented numbers from what we’ve ever done in the past,” said Vice Adm. Nancy Norton, director of DISA, which serves as the Pentagon’s IT support agency.

DISA and the services rushed to prepare networks for increased cyber risks posed by working from home:

• Expand the virtual private network used for more secure access.

• Increase network bandwidth to handle remote traffic spikes.

• Upgrade IT infrastructure to handle more users online.

• Then, develop the employee collaboration platform.

“There was a point where we were having everybody coming after us with all kinds of requests to use just about every collaboration tool you can imagine,” Deasy said.

“I remember tasking a team literally to get together [during] a week and a weekend and sit down and come back and say: ‘Bring us the solution that, you know, we can contractually make happen quickly, will integrate well into our environments, that we know can scale to a million-plus, we know we can secure with U.S. Cyber Command.’”

IT leaders suddenly had to deliver a suite of tools to employees that differed from the ones with which they were familiar. Beyond scaling the collaboration platform to more than a million people, the next challenge became clear: training those employees to use it. Before that could happen, the IT team needed to understand the collaboration requirements of component after component.

All the top IT leaders pointed to the critical role of the meetings by the high-level coronavirus telework task force, in which participants gathered requirements for the collaboration platform — typically a prolonged process.

“Oftentimes you spend the first few years just trying to make sure that everybody clearly and completely agrees on the requirements,” Norton said. “Well, we didn’t do that for this at all.

We said: ‘OK, here are the basics for the requirements. Now let’s start building and let’s start delivering, and that’s that minimum viable product.’”

The CVR Environment on which the task force settled is a temporary platform accredited at cybersecurity impact level 2, which allows users to work with unclassified, noncritical mission information. The group decided early on to deliver the platform using a software development process that Deasy and other IT leadership have backed for years: DevSecOps, where a product is delivered with minimum capabilities, and improvements are added incrementally.

On March 17, the DoD CIO told the Cloud Computing Program Office that workers needed a collaboration platform.

“Less than 24 hours after first hearing about that, folks from my team contacted me saying: ‘Hey, we want to do this, we think we can do this, and we think we can roll it out in a matter of weeks,’” Woods said. “It’s hard to not have your initial reaction be: ‘You’re crazy. How are we supposed to do this?’”

Delivering software in record time

For the small Cloud Computing Program Office team, March 19 marked the start of a nearly nonstop push to build and roll out the collaboration platform. That workday stretched into days of around-the-clock activity.

“We worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that’s not an exaggeration,” Woods said.

The minimum viable product that the CCPO introduced was a “bare bones” version of Teams, Woods said, with chat function and video conferencing. When emails introducing the software first landed in employee inboxes, a “bunch” of workers forwarded the notifications to the help desk thinking that they were phishing attacks, Woods said. One person forwarded it with the message “not today, ISIS,” referring to the militant Islamic State group.

The IT team brought the first test accounts online March 20, about 24 hours after the group started working on CVR. By March 25, the first pilot users were live. Those testers reached the highest levels of the Pentagon: flag officers, general officers and senior executives. Within a week, senior leaders cleared CVR for departmentwide use.

The department ramped up the number of users it added daily, starting with hundreds a night, growing to thousands, to ultimately adding 250,000 users in one night. As employees established more accounts, requests poured in for new capabilities, such as conference calls.

The team had a growing and flexible list of capabilities it wanted to add.

“The list got reprioritized based on the demand from the users,” Woods said.

The CVR delivery embodied the DevSecOps approach that IT officials preached for the last few years, with a continuous loop of user feedback. Every night, the CVR team combed through comments and tweaked the platform.

For example, Woods said, the CCPO team received feedback about information that would be helpful in the CVR welcome email.

“Every night, we would make small adjustments to that welcome email to provide greater clarity and understanding about what was happening,” Woods said. “Yes, it went out really quickly. There was maybe a degree of confusion amongst some of the users. But we took all of that feedback, rapidly reacted to it, and it resulted in a better product.”

As the CVR journey continued, the CCPO team added an automated self-service portal to respond to an influx of basic questions about user accounts, saving the department more than $10 million on help desk costs, according to Norton.

The delivery didn’t come without hiccups. Some agencies wanted to know when the CVR platform would reach their offices so leaders would have ample time to prepare their workforce. But because Woods’ team moved so fast, delivery sometimes came when agencies weren’t expecting it.

“Those are just some of the missteps [involved when] speed was so critical because of the urgency of the requirement,” Woods said. “And you do have these little missteps, and that’s OK. And I know that’s very uncomfortable, especially when you’re looking at the traditional way that DoD has often done IT development.

“It was so critical to why CVR was successful. Embracing some of that discomfort so that we didn’t lose speed, but that we could also react quickly to course-correct every day.”

Faster in the future?

The Cloud Computing Program Office continued to strengthen the collaboration platform throughout the pandemic spikes of the summer and fall, which kept DoD workers mostly at home. The success led the department to develop a permanent remote collaboration solution with stronger cybersecurity that will replace the first version this coming summer.

The unparalleled speed at which the department implemented CVR, along with several other projects to enable telework, raises a significant question: How does the accomplishment shift expectations for IT projects?

The experience established a playbook for faster deployment, officials said.

“CVR just obliterated the myth that it takes years for the department to deploy a capability at scale,” Woods said. “The big piece of the shift is you want speed. The question is: How do you get speed? And I think this is where authentic agile practices become so critical.”

However, it’s not feasible for department personnel and contractors to stay up all night for several days in a row to set up user accounts and deliver new tools outside of a national emergency like the COVID-19 outbreak.

But the work during the pandemic proved that the department can move faster on regular IT projects outside of all-out crisis mode if it successfully uses the DevSecOps concept.

“Anytime you’re able to clearly align all of the different enablers to understand what the focus is, then you don’t have slowdowns and barriers” caused by different offices like finance, contracting or sustainment professionals, Norton said. “When everybody’s on the same sheet of music, focused on delivery, then you can do this for any number of projects.”

Mark Valentine, general manager of Microsoft’s national security team, said developing CVR with the department left lasting lessons in the value of a close relationship between the DoD and a contractor, leading to openness about departmental challenges.

“There’s always risk in doing anything new,” he said. “And therefore I think that the trust that we had from the relationship and continued to build through the crisis was absolutely instrumental into making it a success.”

Proactive support from senior leadership was the cornerstone of the project. Executives removed identified barriers, making “hard choices” that balanced capability, security, mission and speed, cutting the timeline from months to weeks, Woods said.

“That was a really big deal, and not necessarily the way that you would expect leadership at the highest levels to engage, but they did,” Woods said. “It [the quick decision-making] let them comfort and support their communities. And then it really helped us make sure that it [the platform] was meeting the needs of the department.”

Woods pointed to the services’ desire to rapidly deploy a permanent Office 365 solution for remote work. Instead of releasing the capability as a “big bang,” IT teams are incrementally shipping out new tools as part of a minimum viable product, she explained.

“Everything that we did on the teleworking front shows that the DoD technologists could move quickly and show real creativity and out-of-box thinking like the private sector can do,” Deasy said.

From those early days in March, the uncertainty about the pandemic’s severity drove a stronger platform, a standard that should be the goal of future DoD projects, Deasy said.

“The way we built it is one word: enduring,” he said. “We didn’t stand up something that was fragile. … We always designed everything to be enduring, meaning that we didn’t know how long the pandemic would go on. But we knew that whatever we built, it had to be built in a way that could become a lasting asset for the department.”

As the pandemic still rages in the U.S., the department faces new uncertainties. Traditionally, political appointees such as Deasy, the department’s CIO, leave with a new administration. Norton’s tenure at DISA ends in a few months. Their roles in the pandemic response rewrote the expectations on future IT projects. But will the lessons they learned endure?

WASHINGTON — The reported cyber breach through an IT contractor’s software used by the military highlights the risks the Department of Defense takes when it increasingly must rely on third-party vendors for digital services.

As civilian agencies disconnected Monday from the SolarWinds’ Orion platform under government orders, the Department of Defense declined to comment on whether its systems are among those across several government agencies reportedly accessed by hackers affiliated with Russia’s foreign intelligence agency. SolarWinds counts all five military services, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency among its clientele for the network management platform, and said Monday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the hack between March and June affected “fewer than” 18,000 customers — both government agencies and businesses.

Speaking with CBS News Tuesday night, Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller said he hadn’t seen evidence of a compromise yet, adding “looking at it right now, don’t have anything definitive.” He said the department was continue to assess the damage.

“We have standard operating procedures in place that are very refined when an intrusion is noted or a potential intrusion so that we can monitor our networks and counteract anything,” Miller said.

With agencies just now unplugging from the platform, the extended time that hackers potentially had access to government emails and other information particularly alarmed experts.

“This is just the price that the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and the U.S. government, writ large, are going to pay over and over for their continued and increasing reliance on, at its core, code that someone else wrote and tested on their network” (as opposed to code that they wrote and they tested), said Philip Reiner, CEO of the Institute for Security and Technology, who also formerly served at DoD and on the National Security Council.

“As the Department of Defense continues to expand its trust in third-party products and services, because it has no choice, really, this will only get worse. Trust is a transitive property, and threat actors know this, which is why they take advantage of it.”

The Navy and Army referred questions to the Department of Defense, which declined to comment. A spokesperson for the chief information officer of the Air Force did not respond right away to a request for comment.

A U.S. Cyber Command spokesperson said the command is assessing the issue. “U.S. Cyber Command is postured for swift action should any defense networks be compromised. We are in close coordination with our interagency, coalition, industry and academic partners to assess and mitigate this issue.”

Reuters, which first reported the breach, identified the departments of Commerce, Treasury and Homeland Security as agencies that hackers infiltrated. The Washington Post reported that the group behind the intrusions was APT29, which is associated with the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency. Reuters reported that the breach was severe enough for the National Security Council to call an emergency meeting. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that “national security agencies and defense contractors” were among the breached organizations. FireEye, a cybersecurity company with significant federal contracts, announced last week that hackers broke into its servers, which the Washington Post attributed to the same Russian outfit.

What this could mean for the Defense Department

Greg Touhill, who served as the federal government’s first chief information security officer and helped oversee response to the 2015 breach of the Office of Personnel Management, told C4ISRNET that the DoD needs to be on “red alert.”

“I’m in the DoD, I’m thinking, ‘They’re inside, and they’ve been snooping around and laying low,’” said Touhill, a retired Air Force brigadier general and president of Appgate Federal. “So I’m very concerned to find them in the DoD and across the whole federal government; they should be very concerned. And you know what? Those of us in the industry, we ought to be very concerned as well. So this is a five-alarm fire.”

Hackers gained initial access through SolarWinds software updates, allowing them to move within networks beyond the contractor-supported systems.

“This is just an unprecedented breach of commonly used network management tools,” said Trey Herr, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative under the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. “If you’re DoD, you’re looking at a significant impingement on your ability to do every basic office function in a way that you can be assured is not subject to significant compromise.”

The hack through the supply chain comes as the Defense Department works to ramp up contractor cybersecurity requirements through the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, which evaluates contractors’ cybersecurity strength.

“It certainly highlights the criticality of improving the security posture of the supply chain,” said Jacob Olcott, vice president of government affairs at BitSight Technologies. “However, one of the significant gaps in CMMC today is the real-time, timeliness issue … You could imagine a situation where an organization would have answered positively to a lot security checkboxes and then something like this happens.”

Across the military services, components are turning to managed service providers for many “as a service” functions, particularly IT as a service. In a recent webinar, a top official at the Army program office task with managing the service’s enterprise network said that there’s “probably nothing that we’re not looking at as ‘as a service.’”

Jon Bateman, a fellow in the Cyber Policy Initiative at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace, told C4ISRNET that the situation highlighted the limits of cybersecurity.

“You’ve got the leading entities in the world, the U.S government or … FireEye, and then you’ve got the leading hackers in the world, some of them are in Russia. And just given enough time and persistence and effort, the offense can win in huge ways,” said Bateman, who served as special assistant to former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford. “I think that shows us something about the limits of cybersecurity.”

While initially, the goal of the intrusion was purely espionage, the access could have been used for disruption, Herr said. In a hypothetical example, he noted it could have been strategically timed with a significant event crippling DoD’s ability to send emails or other functions, which would be a significant handicap.

The access provided by the intrusion to a foreign actor would be a goldmine from an espionage perspective, Herr added. Being able to read interdepartmental communications and exchanges affords the hackers the opportunity to learn about more about the decisions made within the U.S. government and what is important to leaders.

“I could, for example, from an espionage standpoint, get a much clearer sense of where my redline might be and run significantly closer to that, or see where there’s less interest in or focus on certain geographic or topical areas and policies and push my activity in that direction away from the adversary’s focus, which in this case, be the United States’ focus as a way to avoid penalties,” he said.

Moreover, the duration of the access means that the actor has a good snapshot of the U.S. decision making process rather than just a small snapshot in time.

On Sunday, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, which is tasked with securing federal networks, directed federal civilian agencies to unplug all SolarWinds Orion products. In the directive, CISA categorized the breach as grave. Across the government, an effort to assess the damage from the breach is underway.

“The NSC is working closely with @CISAgov, @FBI, the intelligence community, and affected departments and agencies to coordinate a swift and effective whole-of-government recovery and response to the recent compromise,” NSC spokesman John Ullyot wrote in a tweet Monday morning.

Reaction from the Hill

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers expressed great concern about the supply chain tactics to reach into federal agencies.

“Software supply chain attacks of this nature can have devastating and wide-ranging effects — whether it’s via niche Ukrainian tax software or, as here, network management tools relied upon by some of the world’s largest companies,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “As we gather more information on the impact and goals of these malign efforts, we should make clear that there will be consequences for any broader impact on private networks, critical infrastructure or other sensitive sectors.”

California Democrat Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, called cybersecurity breaches like this a persistent problem.

“These intrusions reinforce the need to secure our unclassified government networks and those in the private sector that partner with the government,” Schiff said.

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who chaired the bipartisan Cyber Solarium Commission, pointed to the risks posed by the sheer magnitude of the federal government’s supply chain.

“I hesitate to even imagine how many vendors there are to the United States government,” King said. “So that underlines that danger.”

Companies doing business with the Pentagon total around 300,000.

According to John Sherman, the principal deputy chief information officer at the Pentagon, the DoD CIO office expects the Commercial Virtual Remote Environment to be used through next June as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to plague the United States.

The CVR platform, a Microsoft Teams platform that allows for unclassified collaboration between DoD employees, has over 1 million employees across the enterprise. It’s a platform that the DoD has long touted as a major success of ensuring that the department remains productive during the pandemic.

The DoD team is working on developing an “enduring solution” that would enable telework after personnel begin returning to the office. Right now, the CIO’s office is working to establish a new CVR environment with an upgraded security level up to Impact Level Five, which will enable DoD users to work on mission-critical information. The current environment is certified at an Impact Level two, which allows users to work on noncritical mission information from home.

“We know we need a more enduring solution but [one] that keeps the same functionality of CVR, which allows us to talk to people at IL-2, talk to people not on the Department of Defense Information Network,” Sherman said at C4ISRNET’s CyberCon event Oct. 28.

The department began using CVR in March. Top IT leaders boast that the platform was rolled out rapidly, though it was initially expected to be a temporary solution. At one point, the DoD added 250,000 new users in one day. The next iteration of that collaboration platform, Sherman said, will also retain the “bring your own approved device” capability that the CVR platform currently has.

The department’s shift in telework was boosted in part by $300 million allocated by Congress as part of a massive coronavirus relief package.

The services also had to make major investments to prepare for telework. The Army expanded its network capacity by 400 percent; the Air Force increased its virtual private network infrastructure from 10,000 users to 400,000 users; and the Navy increased remote network access for up to 500,000 users.

Sherman also highlighted how the CVR environment allowed the National Guard help respond to the pandemic, adding that the unclassified environment “is exactly what they needed to be able to help set up the field hospitals, help work on some of the medical supply chain issues.”

Donald Coulter, senior science and technology adviser to the Network Cross-Functional Team, said on a Monday webinar hosted by C4ISRNET that one of the team’s priorities for the next year is advancing wearable technology for user authentication.

Under current capabilities, users are authenticated using passwords, common access cards or tokens to verify themselves. But these capabilities aren’t good enough in an operational environment, Coulter said.

“These can be broken, damaged [or] lost in an operational environment,” he said. “Trying to put in a password with tactical gloves when it’s a tiny keyboard is not an optimal solution.”

With the wearables, soldiers’ identities are verified using biometric data such as heartrates, gait, unique skin signatures and physical locations. The benefits of wearable technology is twofold: It makes the Army’s systems increasingly secure, while being more intuitive for the soldier in the field.

One of the first places the Army plans to “experiment and prove out” wearables is with the Integrated Visual Augmentation System — essentially artificial intelligence-enhanced goggles that assist with navigation, targeting, and advanced night and thermal vision. The IVAS effort is led by the Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team.

The Army finds the technology quite promising, “especially when you talk about the infusion of more artificial intelligence and machine-learning capacity — to really study, to capture more data and tag it, and really understand the unique characteristics of each person,” Coulter said. “It really gives us more confidence and ability to perform that effectively.”

He added that the wearable technology is mature, and his team may field it in the coming years.

Wearable technology is something the Network CFT is closely watching, but it’s also focused on protecting communications for manned-unmanned teaming, cyber situational awareness, the squad area network and IVAS radio.

“Over the next year we’ll continue to see more and more technologies getting out of the S&T domain and getting into the [project managers] for final prototyping, experimentation, maturation and integration,” Coulter said.