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WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s latest memorandum on its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) aims to “lay out the conditions” for how the entire department and military services can leverage the contract “to the greatest extent possible,” according to an official from the Defense Department’s chief information office (CIO).
“So now we really are in a place where we need to make sure that we look at our entire cloud landscape, rationalize our cloud landscape, enable the military departments to make sure that they continue to use their platforms to optimize cloud,” Lily Zeleke, deputy CIO for information enterprise, said at a Defense One Cloud Workshop event on Tuesday.
“However, we want to make sure that JWCC is the prime and optimal contract that we’ve put in place,” she continued. “So the guidance is going to enable that and enable rationalization as well.”
The $9 billion JWCC contract is a multi-vendor, multi-cloud follow-up to the infamous single-source failed Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which was canceled in 2021. The new venture is envisioned as DoD’s premier computing contract and is meant to provide the department “with enterprise-wide, globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge.”
Last December, the Pentagon awarded Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Oracle all spots on the JWCC contract to build out its key military cloud computing backbone. And then this March, all four vendors won their first task orders under the contract.
But since the project’s inception it’s been unclear if or how individual departments or military services are meant to — or mandated to — use JWCC versus their own cloud options.
The memo [PDF], released publicly on Aug. 2, aimed to provide some clarity and said all Office of the Secretary of Defense components and “defense agencies and field activities” (DAFAs) should use JWCC “for all available offerings to procure future enterprise cloud computing capabilities and services.”
“All cloud capabilities and services currently under contract in OSD Components and DAFAs will transition to the JWCC vehicle upon expiration of their current period of performance,” according to the memo.
Military services (MILDEPs) and combatant commands (COCOMS) are also tasked with using JWCC “for all available offerings for any new cloud computing capabilities and services at the Secret (Impact Level 6) or Top Secret, including all tactical edge and Outside the Continental United States (OCONUS) cloud computing capabilities and services.”
However, the memo also notes that the MILDEPs and COCOMs still can leverage other vehicles besides JWCC to procure other cloud capabilities, effectively not mandating the use of JWCC.
“While not mandating JWCC use for all cloud capabilities and services, DoD CIO will encourage MILDEPs and CCMDs to consider use of JWCC for their needs, especially as trends from OSD Component and DAFA-use provide additional data points in the coming year on price competitiveness and mission efficacy,” according to the memo.
In January, DoD Chief Information Officer John Sherman first revealed to Breaking Defense that his office was developing a memorandum to “rationalize” JWCC. The intent wasn’t to override individual cloud efforts from the military services, but Sherman’s vision would have effectively set JWCC as the primary cloud option that would serve as the “absolute foundation” for the Pentagon’s sprawling Joint All Domain Command and Control effort.
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“I’m not gonna do anything capriciously or just with a sledgehammer here,” he said then. “This will be with a surgical knife about where things need to go, and… if I was my boss, I would expect the CIO to be doing this and make sure the government is getting the best value for our dollar and the very best mission outcome. And that’s why rather than just let this kind of run on autopilot, there is going to be some guidance about how this works.”
Speaking at the Defense One event, Zeleke said additional JWCC task orders are in the pipeline right now and that the new memorandum will kickstart a new governance council for JWCC, though that isn’t meant to function “like the gavel and we’re sitting at the head of the table.”
“No, it really means that we have the mechanism to make not just the users and the components accountable, but us as DoD CIO, and [Defense Information Systems Agency] as the service arm and the program office for JWCC — all of us across the board from an acquisition standpoint, from a technical standpoint, from processes standpoint — accountable,” she said.
According to the memo, the governance council, now called the DoD Information Enterprise Portfolio Management, Modernization and Capabilities Council, will provide a “broader forum to continue with existing and expanding digital modernization activities relevant to the Department’s information enterprise, including the current and future cloud initiatives as well as contractual efforts, and review of procurement administrative lead time for cloud initiatives.”
The council will include members from DoD components and agencies, the memo says.