The Defense Innovation Unit, the DoD’s Silicon Valley-based organization that works with nontraditional contractors, offered the drones across the DoD as well in 2020, according to its annual report. The drones can be used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions in tactical environments.

The organization released small unmanned aerial systems made by five companies through the General Services Administration’s schedule, allowing agencies across the government to purchase them, the report said.

“These sUAS are the first DIU-facilitated product made available not only across DoD but also across the U.S. government,” the document stated.

The commercial drones available through DIU’s Blue sUAS program provide domestically produced unmanned systems, a critical need because the drone market is dominated by a Chinese maker DJI, a company designated a national security threat late last year due to concerns about adversaries’ ability to access a drones’ data or even take over control.

“The Blue sUAS program provides the DoD and Federal government with trusted sUAS capabilities at commercially comparable unit costs on the General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule to ensure ease of procurement and signals aggregate government demand to strengthen the domestic sUAS industrial base,” the report said.

The U.S. makers are Altavian Inc., Skydio Inc., Vantage Robotics, Teal Drones Inc. and Parrot. Secure, domestic options are cheaper for the DoD and civilian agencies that have to rely on “less capable, more expensive government-developed systems or on cyber vulnerable commercial sUAS,” the report stated. The original prototype value was $18 million, and the project transitioned to the GSA schedule last September.

The Blue sUAS is one of 11 projects that DIU transitioned to the department in 2020, up from nine last year. Those projects span DIU’s well-established portfolio covering space, artificial intelligence, autonomy, cyber and human systems. DIU added a sixth technological area focused on advance energy and materials in October.

In 2020, DIU awarded 56 prototype other transaction contracts to commercial vendors, down slightly from 63 in 2019. The organization saw increases in several other areas, posting 23 solicitations in 2020, up from 17. It had a 50 percent increase over 2019 in the average number of proposals received from industry on each proposal request.

“This level of growth is a result of the depth and breadth of DIU’s relationships with U.S. innovation ecosystems, bolstered by a strong team of individuals with diverse commercial and military backgrounds; our offices in Silicon Valley, Boston, and Austin; and our ability to build a trusted, repeatable process to do business with DoD that yields annual recurring revenue,” the report states.

DIU slipped in the time from the close of a solicitation to contract award. The innovation arm hopes to reduce that timeline to 60 to 90 days, but 2020 saw an increase to 149 days, up from 127 days in 2019.

“This slowdown is primarily attributed to increasing project throughput and the growing number of company proposals per solicitation. However, speed to award is important to us, and DIU will continue to strive toward a goal of 60 to 90 days to contract award,” the annual report said.

DIU also tackled projects related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including a $1.8 million effort to use commercial wearables to collect and analyze users’ biometric data to warn of potential infection. The effort, called Rapid Analysis of Threat Exposure, transitioned to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in March and was scaled to 7,000 users. At the point when the annual report was written, the wearables had a success rate topping 65 percent for COVID-19 detection.

Looking forward, DIU outlined several ongoing priority projects across its technology portfolios. To combat COVID-19, the organization is working with the Naval Medical Research Center’s Advanced Medical Development Program Office to prototype tools that can mitigate the spread of respiratory diseases. It’s also working on a predictive health effort with DoD components, including the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and Defense Health Agency, that would use AI and augmented reality to assist in diagnosing health problems such as cancer.

In the drone space, DIU is prioritizing two counter-UAS projects to defend installations using radio frequency and non-radio frequency to detect and defeat capabilities.

In its space portfolio, DIU is prioritizing an effort to improve space situational awareness during peacetime, the report says. The project seeks capabilities that can provide warnings during the daytime, nighttime and during all weather conditions.

“This capability will help facilitate timely analysis of emerging threats, allowing the Joint Force to respond quickly, optimize the deployment of exquisite capabilities, and share unclassified data and insights with allies and partners,” the report said.

According to the report, DIU has 51 ongoing projects that eligible for transition to the department if successfully completed.

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?

The pandemic sent organizations across the United States scrambling to support mass telework, but none had to meet the size and scale of the Defense Department with its millions of employees. One of the major initiatives rushed out by IT leadership at the Defense Department was the Commercial Virtual Remote Environment, a Microsoft Teams environment that provided remote collaboration tools to DoD users across the world.

The platform has more than 1 million users and provides secure access to unclassified work. According to Caroline Kuharske, senior strategic planner for the services directorate and the strategic communication lead for CVR, the document sharing platform and cloud storage capability has been one of the most popular tools CVR supports.

Kuharske told C4ISRNET that part of the success was because early on in the pandemic the team “really clearly defined goals and what the outcome needed to be.”

“The more that you’re able to message early, with both internal and external sources, that definitely helps to create that narrative that, ‘yes, we are in a very unfamiliar state, but we are going to be able to do our jobs for this nation,’” Kuharske said.

The new platform meant users had to learn new tools, which is always a challenge. Kuharske said that the DoD IT leadership set up training programs for employees “to provide that level of comfort to where these warfighters weren’t focused on how hard this may be, but rather, ‘I can use this new tool and complete my mission.’”

The CVR platform’s self-service capability allows users to reset passwords and accounts without contacting a help desk, a function that has provided $21 million in service desk savings, according to Kuharske.

DISA had to do more than just roll out the CVR platform to ensure mission continuity during work from home. Another critical component was DISA’s Defense Collaboration Services program office, led by program manager Carey Burris. which rolled out a chat tool to Android devices to allow 135 employees to message with DoD employees from their mobile device. According to Burris, the typical timetable to scale the services they provided would take two to three months, but during the pandemic they did it in five weeks.

“Everyone understood the sense of urgency and that need. And how the entire department was department was depending on us,” Burris said. “There was a lot of synergy and just collaboration among the group. So it was just involvement of everyone understanding that ‘hey, this is something that we’ve got to get done.’”

The DCS program also used automation to deploy the tools faster.

“If it’s done manually, sometimes individuals move away from the script. They may think ‘okay, I got a shortcut’ or ‘I can skip this process to move it along.’ But if you’re using automated tools and you’re running those tools, it’s a repeatable process that it’s going through and you don’t have to worry about things being missed,” Burris said.

Some capabilities are likely to remain once work returns to normal. The CVR environment is a temporary solution, but top IT leaders at the DoD have said that an enduring solution will be implemented in June 2021 with higher security levels.

“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,” DoD principal deputy CIO John Sherman said at C4ISRNET’s CyberCon event Oct. 28.

Speaking at the C4ISRNET CyberCon event, Maj. Gen. Maria Barrett, commanding general of the Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command, said the capability was nearly ready to be put into production, where it will be distributed to about 2,000 users.

The pilot program included 500 people. It used commercial solutions to access sensitive data and classified data up to the secret level. In June, Barrett told C4ISRNET the “majority” of devices accessing sensitive or secret information would be virtual desktops with no data storage on the end user device, while others would store data to allow for users to work offine.

Under the program, users can access both the Non-classified Internet Protocol (IP) Router Network and the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network on the same laptop.

“I can take it on a trip, I fire it up and I have full desktop functionality …. I can do video teleconferencing, I can go to portals. So it’s not just email,” Barrett said.

She said that the service has “advertised” the new classified capability out to “a number” of Army components, particularly ones that have requested DoD Mobility Classified Capability (DMCC) devices from the Defense Information Systems Agency. That tool allows limited classified abilities, but not to the same extent for Barrett’s use case.

“For any Army element that has requested these [DMCC] devices from DISA, we’re looking at that list and saying could this substitute for DMCC requests that you put in so that the DMCC’s can go back into the pool available to the rest of DoD,” Barrett said.

In the future, she said, she would like to move the Army away from maintaining its own infrastructure to enable the capability.

“Ideally in the future, I’d love to see a CSfC solution that leverages Impact Level-Six cloud and that would unencumber us from having to stand up and maintain our own infrastructure,” Barrett said, referring to the DoD cloud certification level that allows for secret data storage.

Meanwhile, the Department of the Navy’s chief information security officer recently took notice of the classified capability that the Army’s NETCOM was rolling out. Chris Cleary, the Navy’s chief information security officer, said he was recently briefed on the Army classified telework program and is trying to move it higher up the Navy’s list of priorities.

Classified telework “was seen as a little lower on our priority stack until we [saw] that. Wow, maybe there is an easier way to do this. And somebody already thought through all the heavy lifting, i.e. the Army initiative,” Cleary said. “I’m already running this up the stack to see what the Navy’s interest or would this drive classified telework capability to a little higher on the priority list.”

From Cleary’s view, classified telework is safer and more convenient as the DoD operates in a pandemic.

“Anybody who had to do … work on a high side machine still had to go into the building for the most part,” Cleary said. “I might have a message that says somebody’s got to do something and then I’ve got to send one of my employees into the Pentagon so they can go do work. Well, is that the right thing to do? Should I put that employee at risk to go back and do the hot zone just to do something on a classified environment?”

The project, from the Defense Innovation Unit, Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and Philips Healthcare uses artificial intelligence to analyze biometric data to detect potential COVID-19 infections in asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic carriers and slow the spread of the virus.

The early-warning system prototype is part of the DoD’s Rapid Analysis of Threat Exposure (RATE) technology and has been used for COVID-19 detection for a dozen different cohorts of military and non-military personnel in clinic trials, according to a press release. The system can detect early, “sub-clinical” symptoms up to 48 hours before overt symptoms appear, Lt. Col. Jeff “Mach” Schneider, a DIU program manager told C4ISRNET.

“The immediate priority was to work with cohorts that were either in some kind of front line capacity,” such as health care workers, “or that were more severely impacted from a readiness standpoint,” he said.

The technology is in use by about 700 workers in the U.S. Navy and Office of the Secretary of Defense, Schneider said. He added that the study will expand to about 5,000 new users across different services, commands and the United States Military Academy.

“As we continue to collect data and refine the algorithm, priority will continue to be provided to those first responders and those that have had to adopt new operational tempo to support their duty obligations,” Schneider said.

The RATE program uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze a person’s biometric data and detect small changes in a person before they experience any symptoms. The system can then alert a user they may be infected so they can quarantine or change their behavior to prevent further spreading the disease.

“RATE would allow us to non-invasively monitor a service member’s health and provide early alerts to potential infection that will help us to ensure troop readiness, better support their health and protect against the threat of further spread of the disease,” said Edward Argenta, science and technology manager at DTRA, said in a statement. “Unlike other more narrow approaches, this solution is designed to recognize a wide variety of infections and can help identify future novel threats.”

The RATE program’s COVID-19 detection application deployed to military units in mid-June, while Dr. Joseph Frassica, Philips’ head of research in the Americas, added that the algorithm is being further refined to better project COVID-19 infections. The RATE-COVID app is designed to work with all wearables and the team is looking to deploy to bring-your-own devices “in the future,” the release said.

RATE originally started years ago to slow the spread of general infections such as the flu, Frassica told C4ISRNET in an interview. In March, the partnership pivoted to the coronavirus pandemic, he said.

“With Covid it became even more critical to find those people who are pre-symptomatic to get them out of the population before they have a high enough viral load to start to spread the disease,” Frassica said.

The RATE program uses large-scale machine learning to analyze data across 165 biomarkers from a data set owned by Philips that contains 41,000 cases of hospital-acquired infections. Biomarker data is then process and analyzed in the cloud, generates an hourly RATE score that service members can then access through a secure website. it looks at several biometric markers such as temperature and blood pressure. The press release added that the risk score also works for “multiple general types of infection,” with Philips scientists also working to generate a tool that can detect the “next new unknown infectious agent.”

“By combining commercial technology, a rich data source and simple-to-use wearables, we are effectively providing a check-engine light on the military service member and getting that alert before they’re broken down with a disease. In military speak, we’re targeting left-of-cough awareness,” said Christian Whitchurch, DIU human systems portfolio director, in a statement.

Schneider said that that project cost about $7 million in total, including funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. Texas A&M’s Engineering Experiment Station also worked on the project.

The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center’s COVID-19 project, called Project Salus, delivered AI tools to leaders at U.S. Northern Command, with which they predicted shortfalls in food and medical supplies. With Project Salus, the JAIC focused on quick development and delivery of the tools — an effort that has taught several lessons as the center moves forward with its joint war-fighting effort and as its acting director pushes the organization to become “the world’s best software company.”

“With Project Salus, one of the key things that we pivoted on was the ability for us very quickly — in a couple weeks — to get a base product that really didn’t have a great looking [user interface] or other pieces there, but had the core functionality in the hands of NORTHCOM leaders,” JAIC acting Director Nand Mulchandani said at a Sept. 10 news conference.

The leaders provides “feedback on what was working and not working,” Mulchandani added.

Project Salus focused on pandemic response through predictive logistics and is far from a war-fighting platform. Still, the effort helped inform JAIC’s leadership identify how to best support the Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort. JAIC leadership learned that platforms must directly help the commander, not only supporting staff, make decisions.

“When the commander sees the value — ‘Hey, I can re-task people from this effort over to this effort because you’ve helped me automate some of these processes’ — then it gives us a real victory,” said Army Col. Brad Boyd, the JAIC’s chief of joint war-fighting operations. “So it kind of gives us a road map for continued work in Joint All-Domain Command and Control based on the things that we learned from Salus.”

The Salus platform, Boyd said, is a piece of a larger command-and-control system. The platform allowed users to plug in their data feeds and get the answers they needed with far less human effort.

“You want to make sure that the machine is doing things well that machines do so that you can enable humans to do the things that the humans want to do. And Salus showed us that if you can automate the processes, and get the humans out of process and into reasoning, that you’re going to be successful,” Boyd said.

There’s also a cost benefit to a platform like Salus. Building a generic platform for use by multiple components — and even some federal users outside of the department — saves the JAIC money on building, owning and maintaining Salus, Mulchandani said.

“Software is one of the few areas of tech where the more you build and the more you deploy, the cheaper it gets,” Mulchandani said. “We’ve got to get great about that here at the DoD.”

Jane Pinelis, the JAIC’s chief of testing and evaluation, told reporters that the project also brought the JAIC together to build a “true, integrated product team,” bringing together personnel from across several of the JAIC’s national mission initiatives to join forces to respond to the health crisis.

Mulchandani called the effort “an incredible fusion” of expertise from across the JAIC.

The effort was further applauded by top department IT leadership at the DoD AI Symposium held Sept. 9-10. Dana Deasy, the chief information officer for the department, pointed to the JAIC’s work on Project Salus as an example of how the organization will need to operate to be successful in the future.

“I believe the true long-term success of the JAIC will depend on how the organization adapts and delivers real-world solutions when the strategic landscape and priorities change,” Deasy said at the summit on Sept. 10.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, on-site NSA employees are practicing social distancing within the same building, said Greg Smithberger, who also heads the agency’s Capabilities Directorate. In this environment, the agency discovered it’s more efficient when personnel don’t have to walk from meeting to meeting.

“We had a culture of face-to-face meetings, and we’ve learned that we can be a lot more effective and efficient, you know, operating virtually even in our classified environment and then the unclassified things and the telework that opens up,” Smithberger said on a virtual panel hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. “[T]here’s a pretty interesting cross-agency team right now is looking really hard at all the mission areas that could be doing more on the low side, and our ability to really open up telework.”

Telework before the spread of COVID-19 was “rarely done,” he added, and telework in the future will be restricted to unclassified work. The NSA uses the Intelligence Community GovCloud environment for its cloud computing needs, a platform that hosts highly sensitive information and data. Access to the IC-GovCloud will not be allowed from home, Smithberger said.

He also said the NSA’s new way of doing business virtually presents new opportunities for industry to interact with the spy group.

“These more remote-friendly ways of doing business, whether they’re in the classified space or the unclassified space, have really opened up opportunities also for industry partners to bring in talent from other parts of the country that were kind of hard to get into supporting NSA’s mission the way we used to do things,” Smithberger said.

In the last few years, he said, the NSA developed a secure but unclassified environment hosted in the cloud that allowed for software development. Since the pandemic started, his team realized that the security architecture around the environment was strong enough that there wasn’t additional risk in allowing people to use the system from home.

Overall, the NSA wants to broaden its relationship with private industry. Smithberger said the agency is building a similar environment that would allow for collaboration with people who don’t have security clearances but can support the NSA’s capabilities mission, cybersecurity efforts or research work.

“It’s kind of become more of a standard for us … to see how much we can actually do in a less protected environment,” Smithberger said, adding that he also wants the agency to expand “to work with some corporate partners who in some cases simply don’t have access to a [sensitive compartmented information facility], but are fully clearing people.”

The meeting will be held Sept. 2 on Microsoft Teams due to COVID-19, according to a solicitation posted on beta.sam.gov.

“The goal of the event is to assist industry partners and interested government organizations in identifying and aligning their efforts with Army tactical network modernization, specifically Capability Set 23 which is the Army’s next integrated kit of tactical network transport, application and command post enhancements,” the announcement reads.

The Army network leadership team wants to discuss the results of critical design review for Capability Set ’21, the new set of network tools set to be fielded to soldiers next year. The team also wants to discuss Capability Set ’23 experimentation and design goals with a focus on its needs for command post integration and modernization efforts. Command post survivability and mobility is a major focus of Capability Set ’23.

Army’s Network-Cross Functional Team (N-CFT), in collaboration with Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T), the Army’s Combat Capability Development Command’s Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) Center, is hosting the meeting.

The team will also be introducing the Joint Communications Marketplace, the solicitation reads, which will “which will be an online tool and repository for industry and the government to use for submission of CS23 related white papers, and associated technical information,” said Paul Mehney, spokesperson for PEO C3T, in a statement.

Registration is required by Aug. 27.

The pandemic has meant fewer soldiers have availability to perform operational testing for new network equipment, known as Capability Set ’21. Units are either not training or have implemented safety measures such as social distancing or personal protective equipment.

“The COVID-19 has had an impact on our cycle of testing, our access to units, and it’s caused us to make some adjustments in our in our time schedule, as we’ve been trying to take care of the health and safety of our soldiers and our workforce, but still keep our modernization efforts on track,” said Maj. Gen. Peter Gallagher, director of the network cross-functional team for Army Futures Command, at a C4ISRNET event in May.

The Army had to change plans for soldier experiments that were going to play important roles in informing the allocation of new devices across the brigades.

“We had to really start with what were we going to learn specifically from those soldier experiments and how are we going to use that information to help make procurement decisions,” said then-Maj. Gen. David Bassett and former leader of Army Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical at the C4ISRNET conference. Bassett has since been promoted to lieutenant general and now leads the Defense Contract Management Agency.

He added, “And so in most cases, we weren’t really using that to decide whether we were going to buy something or not. [It was] more about the density and the way things were integrated.”

Bassett also said that while the Army did lose out on some field testing, the service had already collected sufficient data in labs that could help “inform some of our decision-making.” He also said that the network modernization team was prepared to make adjustments to equipment because of the challenges associated with coronavirus.

“We’re looking really hard at and when the next opportunities are going to be available to us to get that detailed operational feedback from soldiers either in a training environment or a test environment,” Bassett said.

The coronavirus pandemic “hasn’t limited” the Army’s ability to move forward on procurement decisions because of the large amounts of data it collected in testing for Capability Set ’21.

“I think the risk of making those procurement decisions at this stage has been exceedingly low. And something that I think is a reasonable balance of risk and rigor and agility,” Bassett said.

The testing program was also disrupted at the beginning of the year when the 82nd Airborne Division, a primary partner for testing capabilities, was deployed to the Middle East.

On June 16, the Space and Missile Systems Center announced in a beta.SAM.gov post that it was awarding rideshare contracts to six companies approved by the Industrial Base Council: Aevum, Astra, X-BOW, Rocket Lab USA, Space Vector and VOX Space. Each company was to be awarded two rideshare missions to be conducted over the next 24 months. The value of those contracts was not revealed.

But as first reported by SpaceNews, SMC has withdrawn those awards.

A new statement on beta.SAM.gov notes that the government “is re-evaluating its strategy on how best to proceed with this action” after receiving several responses to its decision. As a result, the contracts will not be awarded at this time. A Justification and Approval document was supposed to be made public within 14 days of contract award, but the withdrawal of the awards occurred before that deadline.

While Space Force officials haven’t spoken publicly about the Defense Production Act awards since they were announced online, the Pentagon was vocal in expressing concern about COVID-19 impacts on the small launch market in the months leading up to the announcement.

On April 20, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord stated that the small launch market was one of three sectors she was most worried about. The Space and Missile Systems Center elaborated on her remarks in a statement to C4ISRNET.

“There is concern that the current financial and market constraints resulting from the COVID-19 have reduced funding sources necessary to continue development and operations for the nascent small launch industry,” said Col. Rob Bongiovi, director of SMC’s launch enterprise directorate. “Much of the industry have limited flight capability or are in the critical transition from development to flight and this funding restriction may prevent or delay these systems. The Space and Missile Systems Center is evaluating the impacts to the small launch industrial base to consider actions to enable a robust U.S. launch industrial base.”

Shortly thereafter, the Space Force Acquisition Council held an emergency meeting to discuss how they could support industry partners negatively impacted by COVID-19. The council ultimately sent out a survey to members of the Space Enterprise Consortium to see what industry needed from the Department of Defense.

Finally on June 16, the same day the announcement went live, SMC Commander Lt. Gen. John “JT” Thompson suggested that the Space Force would use Defense Production Act awards to support the small launch market.

“In the small launch environment, Secretary Lord and [U.S. Space Force Service Acquisition Executive Will] Roper have both commented about how important small launch is to our enterprise, and I can’t give you the details right now but I would anticipate here very shortly some very critical Defense Production Act awards to our small launch providers to keep that industry going,” Thompson said