The Defense Department continues to make progress as it upgrades its networks and IT and installs new joint regional security stacks at 25 locations around the world, but not all the services are immediately jumping on board.
The Army has been the chief user of JRSS, transitioning networks and operations at four locations so far in the U.S., including at Joint Base San Antonio where users from Fort Hood and Fort Sam Houston are transitioning to JRSS. The Air Force, too, is beginning to migrate some of its networks to the initial four U.S. locations and is expected to ramp up alongside the JRSS build-out.
With the end of fiscal 2015, the Defense Information Systems Agency, which is helping lead the JRSS effort, finished up acquisitions for the remaining equipment for contiguous U.S. locations, paving the way for those to become operational this fiscal year.
“That brings up the stacks already built and installed to the level the Army and Air Force can migrate into,” said Col Scott Jackson, chief of DISA’s Joint Information Environment solutions division. “There are a few extra capabilities that the Air Force had in their gateways, and now they can decommission their gateways and get into JRSS. The first four sites’ hardware has arrived, the equipment has been racked up, and now we’re working on the time between acceptance testing and migration of units to activate the capabilities.”
Currently there are five more migrations planned by March, with particular emphasis right now on streamlining the migration process to make it faster and easier to transition users to JRSS from their legacy systems.
“The last six months have been about finding ways to go in, take the unit, and when we cut them over from legacy equipment to JRSS, that’s the migration effort. And it’s been pretty detailed because the last thing we want to do is break any capability or take away something we already had,” Jackson said. “So there’s been tremendous effort to do a lot of discovery, [identifying] a lot of sensors on existing networks to make sure now every connection and every system is running, so when we migrate there are no hiccups. We’ve been finding better tools and processes…to do that faster, to get to where we’re doing migration as fast as possible. The sooner they get on JRSS, the sooner they start saving.”
But while the Army and Air Force have stormed the JRSS field, the Navy and Marine Corps are watching from the sidelines, with the Navy at least starting to draw up some plans for jumping in by determining which of its networks might migrate to JRSS.
So far, the Navy has provided a list of accepted networks, or those that haven’t already been migrated to the Navy’s own upgraded stacks and therefore could potentially move to JRSS.
“So that’s the negotiations starting now, which networks can we do first and when can we get Navy coordination on migration teams, getting them trained up,” Jackson said. “We’ve sent some Navy teams to JRSS training, and once we know that first network and we know which stack it’s going to migrate to, we can better plan that out.”
The Marine Corps, however, is a different story.
“We’re concerned about the concept of operations that goes with” not just JRSS but the broader JIE, BGen Dennis Crall, Marine Corps CIO, said at an AFCEA Northern Virginia chapter event in Vienna, Virginia, Nov. 13. When asked if he has plans for the Marines to transition to JRSS, his response was, “No, the [concept of operations] for how we’d work this is not mature…the software [for JRSS] has to be written to a standard that allows us to do business the way we do business.”
And while the Navy at least has some idea of a future move to JRSS, Crall is less certain of what’s ahead for the Marines and the department-wide program.
“I’d say it’s a definite maybe,” he said.
