“I love AI. I want lots of AI,” Dave McKeown told Breaking Defense. But, so far, neither government nor industry has developed artificial intelligence that can really help with cybersecurity.
The service branches aren't mandated to use the up-to $9 billion services, but the Army and Navy are getting into the game with some secret-level and wargaming-related programs, according to service documents provided to Breaking Defense.
Defense Department Chief Information Officer John Sherman set the tone early in the year by telling Breaking Defense a major focus over 2023 would be aiming for baseline, targeted zero trust within four years.
Sherman said that there is no timeframe for when the department will release a request for information for JWCC 2.0 or when the effort will roll out next year, but added that DoD was “firmly committed to multi-cloud, multi-vendor, and this is what we’re going to be doing going forward.”
DoD "will prioritize technologies that can confound malicious cyber actors and prevent them from achieving their objectives in and through cyberspace," according to an unclassified summary.
The strategy for each service and other defense organizations is meant to align with the Pentagon's aim of getting to "targeted" zero trust by 2027.
"Anybody who leads knows that the hardest thing to do is change culture,” Mark Gorak told Breaking Defense. "And I think we have to do that in order to retain the force we have.”
A recently released memo encourages for all OSD components and "defense agencies and field activities" to use JWCC "for all available offerings to procure future enterprise cloud computing capabilities and services."
The review was launched in April after a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard was hit with two federal charges alleging that he shared classified information about the Russia-Ukraine war on the social media platform Discord.
"In my mind, these are some of these avenues that we're looking at at an idea phase now to see if we can put resources behind it," said Robert Vietmeyer, director for cloud and software modernization.
Many of the themes presented in the strategy are familiar to what officials have talked about in the past when it comes to the department’s cyberspace operations, but full details are classified.
As part of the takeover, Sherman said his office will look at expanding the Pentagon’s 5G pilots to additional DoD installations and added he’ll be looking specifically at open radio access network, or O-RAN, pilots.
The Air Force is considering the move as officials say dozens of task orders, secret and otherwise, are already in the JWCC pipeline.
A leak from a “trusted insider who has gone through the background investigation" and been given access to top-secret level capabilities is “a tough one that we have to be able to put measures to get after," DoD CIO John Sherman said.
The review, whose initial findings are due in 45 days, involves DoD CIO John Sherman, who's already been long at work revamping how the Pentagon protects its secrets.