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The U.S. Army is currently in the throes of a massive change in the way it handles IT systems. After an intensive internal process and insight from congressionally mandated studies, the service has determined that drastic changes are needed for its network and command posts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
One of the Army\u2019s previous challenges involved several programs of record that were unable to talk to each other and weren\u2019t built around threats, but rather toward predetermined standards or baselines. With these large-scale programs, adding new technology or updates to adjust for security concerns can be difficult because tech can evolve on a regular basis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cThis idea of a program of record is going to migrate to a standards-of-record kind of mindset,\u201d Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford, of CIO\/G6, which heads Army network modernization, told reporters Oct. 9 at the Association of the U.S. Army\u2019s annual conference. \u201cThat allows us to take advantage of open architectures. It allows us to take advantage of other commercial and industry standard vice this program of record mindset that we\u2019re going to field for 35 or 40 years in our formations.\u201d<\/p>\n
One area where this manifests itself is the Army\u2019s Command Post Computing Environment, or CP CE, which will consolidate current mission systems and programs into a single user interface, breaking down stovepipes within a command post and allowing commanders at various points \u2014 even from a mounted system in a fielded vehicle \u2014 to see the same map, features and uploads.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
CP CE feeds into the larger Common Operating Environment, or CEO, effort, a set of computing technologies and standards to enable a variety of communications capabilities with common baselines.<\/p>\n
Within CP CE, the Army tests its new approach to IT purchases.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cFirst thing I was told \u2026 from the Army staff \u2026 your No. 1 mission is to buy, not make,\u201d Lt. Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, product manager for tactical mission command within Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, said Oct. 23 in Baltimore, Maryland, during a presentation at the annual MILCOM conference hosted by AFCEA.<\/p>\n
The Army wants to get out of the business of creation and instead leverage what might already be out there \u2014 either with commercial industry or the larger military \u2014 under what the service is calling an adapt-and-buy strategy.<\/p>\n
The adapt-and-buy tactic will enable the Army to more rapidly inject relevant technologies into its programs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
For CP CE, \u201cour organization bought a [commercial off-the-shelf] solution, we\u2019re adapting it to make sure it does everything we need it to do in the Army and then we\u2019re going to field it,\u201d Daiyaan said. This solution, SitaWare, is essentially the backbone to allow CP CE, in which all the desperate command post programs will feed as applications (akin to smartphones), to be overlaid on a single map as opposed to various, incompatible maps that currently exist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
But there is sure to be cultural resistance. For example, the CP CE and COE leads must work with the various program managers of disparate programs of record to ensure they are all adjusting and moving into this environment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Tactical Ground Reporting System (TIGR), Global Command and Control System-Army (GCCS-A), Command Web and Command Post of the Future (CPOF) \u2014 all currently individual, separate programs \u2014 will be included in the first iteration of CP CE in 2019 by 2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Others that have said they have committed to moving in 2021 include Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System and Distributed Common Ground System-Army<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
However, each of these programs \u2014 and others that have not committed yet \u2014 have several contractors that are providing their solutions as well as program offices that have several iterations, increments and capability drops planned for future years. This means they\u2019ll have to adjust some of those requirements, timelines, schedules and plans, officials said, to fit into the CP CE architecture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
After a critical design review, Daiyann said the Army realized they need to implement governance structures for CP CE given all these separate programs fielded over the last 15 years are now going to be apps.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cWe are going to help mentor other programs of record on how to look at their requirements differently to share our requirements and what we\u2019re doing to already meet their requirements and then we\u2019re going to rely on the Army to tell other programs of record I know that that\u2019s what you want but in order to converge, we need you to make a concession,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Daiyaan said the Army is trying to get the programs and their associated requirements community to take an \u201cappetite suppressant\u201d to migrate the basic capabilities the war fighter needs from these programs to CP CE and COE, as the Army has made this migration a top priority. The entire capability or program might not have to migrate, officials told C4ISRNET, but they need the requirements community to whittle down the thousands of requirements for these programs \u2014 in some cases \u2014 to the bare essentials.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The Army also has to work the funding aspect of this with program managers and vendors to ask: \u201cWhat does the money need to look like so that programs are able to do the engineering work to converge hardware systems to a simple application?\u201d Sherri Bystrowski, acting director involved in the COE effort, told C4ISRNET at MILCOM. \u201cThe [program managers] will talk back to the vendors to make sure they\u2019re on board.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Some of these hurdles are cultural as opposed to technical, as some of the individuals within their respective requirements community, according to Diyaan, will say: \u201cI want my stuff to work now and I need everything and so all that COE stuff you\u2019re talking about is not the most important thing to me; my thing is most important.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
All this begs the question of whether the Army will continue forward with its old method of large programs of record such as the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, the service\u2019s\u00a0battlefield network backbone<\/a>, which has been criticized for costing $6 billion dollars only to now essentially be repurposed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n