As the Internet of Things springs up around the world, the Air Force, hamstrung by policies waylaying technology acquisition, is finding itself watching from the sidelines as sensors, mobility and connectivity explode in growth.
Constant connection and never-ending streams of data are a boon for intelligence and cyber operations, but taking advantage of those capabilities means understanding and capitalizing quickly on the latest technologies – something that’s a challenge as Air Force officials struggle with getting around acquisition policies and privacy rules that become hazy in an interconnected world.
“We’ve actually set up a mobility enterprise services panel to support that endeavor of looking at IT devices and how we’re going to manage them across the board, what we’re going to do with them,” said Frank Konieczny, Air Force chief technology officer, said Jan. 21 at the AFCEA mobility summit in Washington. “And that’s the enterprise viewpoint for the Air Force across the board.”
Those issues are target areas for Air Force officials as they determine how the service will manage the explosive growth of devices, he said.
“The question is what policy do we have to change – or do we have to actually generate policy for this? There’s [personally identifiable information, or PII] policy already established. The question is, if I’m monitoring your FitBit…is that PII? It probably is,” Konieczny said. “So all the data that’s accumulating from those devices has to be put somewhere what’s secured. That’s a policy already. Establishing them faster is probably not the real issue, it’s a question of how am I going to understand that they’re secured and registered within the environment?”
Then there are questions of what devices the Air Force actually wants and needs – whether that’s smart phones, tablets or an array of sensors – and on top of that, policies for when things go wrong and repercussions are in order, Koniecnzy added.
Working with industry almost is a double-edged sword here – there’s no shortage of tech capabilities, but they evolve quickly, much faster than the standard acquisition process in place across the Defense Department. But at least one key industry player emphasizes that technology is as much the answer as it is the problem.
“When you set these policies today, the technology does allow you to know…what you’re securing. You can look at what is riding on your infrastructure and set policies much more easily. As you modernize the IT those things are much easier to manage,” said Teresa Carlson, vice president of Amazon Web Services worldwide public sector. “DoD is just sort of stuck between worlds right now. A legacy world where you’re trying to modernize what you’re doing in DoD; once you get to that modernized world – and maybe this can be an area where you can think about modernizing more rapidly – pick one area and say how do we get there faster?”
For airmen across the service, whether deployed, commanding units or working at the Pentagon’s highest echelons, you don’t have to ask them twice: They all want cutting-edge mobile technology, and they want it yesterday.
“What they want from us is the ability to use those shiny tools. The problem is we can all go out there and see the shiny tools and then we try to bring them home with us, and we can’t. And many times we use them anyway,” said Rex Curry, chief of the Air Force’s Logistics Chief Information Officer Support Division, Directorate of Resource Integration, DCS/Logistics, Engineering and Force Protection. “We come to the A6 [Air Force Information Dominance/CIO] community and force it on them to figure out a way to let us use the tools that we’ve become dependent on without their help.”
It’s a problem that is not limited to just the Air Force, nor is it temporary as the military faces downsizing across the services, he noted.
“As we shrink as a DoD and an Air Force, we’ve got to do better with what we have, and one of the things that our future [depends on] is sense and respond,” Curry said. “We want to be able to just take it, use it and know that it’s going to work, and we want to grab the data from them that allows us to sense and respond.”
